I found a gathering of the injured from the battle, formerly enslaved locals and freedom fighters alike. Many of the insurgents were injured from this and previous battles, so I made rounds to heal who I could before I moved on to the regular citizens. It was hard to ignore so many in clear pain, many suffering burns from the fires that had ripped through this town, but the experienced fighters were the priority when it came to freeing the north from the yoke of the Horuth Kingdom.
I spent an hour moving through the fighters, healing the worst of the injuries. I did not have the MP available to heal everyone to full, so I only repaired the injuries that would prevent these men and women from fighting. They would have to recover the rest of their HP with food and rest.
Once the fighters were dealt with, I could finally focus on the rest of the people. I started healing a violently burnt woman, and despite the logic in trying to conserve my MP, I could not stop myself from healing her back to full HP. She was so pained, anything short of that felt cruel.
With her HP fully recovered, she sighed, and smiled.
“Thank you so much,” she said softly as she closed her eyes. She quickly fell asleep with no pain stopping her from resting.
“My pleasure,” I murmured softly.
My Detect skill pinged, and I felt a familiar presence behind me.
I turned to find Leiren, the young woman I had saved alongside Toch when I first involved myself in this mess. She gave me a slight grin. I motioned with my hand and walked over to the next person in need of healing. Leiren tagged along, watching with interest.
I had noticed Leiren showing up after battles, of late. She was a scout for the resistance, so she did not do any fighting, but she was often involved in reconnaissance before the battles. After the battles, I could not help but notice that she often sought me out. Usually, I made myself scarce, but with so many to heal after this battle, she had found me. I approached a burnt man and started healing him. Leiren hummed in thought as I did so, and I glanced out of the side of my eye at her.
“Isn’t that magic forbidden in your country? Unless you are some kind of priest?” she asked, watching the wound healing swiftly before us.
“I’m definitely not with the Church. But yeah, technically, I shouldn’t know how to do this,” I said as I healed the nasty burnt arm and shoulder. The Velgein man’s eyes grew wide as the pain disappeared and he made circles with his shoulder. He looked at me with grateful eyes and I gave him a clap on his now-uninjured shoulder before moving on.
“Seems we’re lucky to have you, then,” she said, leaning towards me.
I tried not to look at her. After the intensity of our initial flight from the army at the start of the summer had faded, and getting everyone back to base and cleaned up, it had become painfully obvious that Leiren was an incredibly pretty young woman, and my body was just starting to reach the age where that was growing problematic for me and my concentration.
I could not exaggerate how nice and simple life was with a body that had not yet gone through puberty. I was able to focus without distraction, and my priorities all felt enlightened and clear. So much of my former life had been burdened with biological desires that I had been gloriously free from for the last seven and a half years since I awoke fully in this life. I would have thought that being almost-eleven years old was too young to start feeling these things, but I suspected pushing my strength skill ahead so far and adding all this muscle on my body forced my testosterone-producing body parts to play catch up and it was starting to hit me at, really, a terrible time. I was increasingly having difficulty focusing.
“I guess,” I finally mumbled in response.
She laughed, and I clenched my jaw in frustration.
I moved through the group of burn victims, healing more, getting increasingly flustered by Leiren watching me, occasionally commenting on my skills with healing magic.
“Don’t you have something to do?” I finally asked her through gritted teeth.
“Not particularly,” she said with a grin.
I glared at her, but not for long before my face started to flush and I had to look away, earning another laugh from the pale woman with silky white hair and pale green eyes whose face I absolutely had not found myself studying.
“Aren’t you too old to be teasing young boys?” I shot off, turning away. Better to just be rude now and get her off my back than trip around this problem for any longer.
“I’m only fourteen,” she said with a frown, and I glanced back at her a little incredulous. They grew up fast in Velgein, apparently.
I shook my head. “Yeah, well, I’m only ten,” I said. “...Almost eleven,” I muttered a moment later, despite myself.
It was her turn to look incredulous. “Really? But…” she looked down at my well-muscled body. “Huh. I just thought you were short.”
“Leiren!” a voice shouted out. It sounded like Toch, who I noticed was as keen to follow her around as she had become of following me. When she turned to his voice, I used my stealth skill and slipped away.
This had not been a problem I anticipated when I decided to join an insurgency. I headed back to find someone in leadership to see what else I could learn or do to help.
* * *
It was not long before the Velgeins had the local refinery up and running again, so I made my way through town finding the various orbs of iron oxide encased in stone and bringing them back for smelting. Rather than expend any additional MP floating them back to the refinery, I had help in the form of strong and healthy Velgeins who rolled each of the orbs back with their raw strength.
Without taming magic, the Velgeins had no beasts of burden to do this kind of work. Despite rather advanced steel manufacturing, the Velgeins were otherwise quite primitive. They had not domesticated any animals, just like in Horuth, but they barely had agriculture either, with plants not growing particularly well in the low light conditions. There were some root vegetables and hardy greens that they grew to augment their diet, which was primarily hunted and cured meats.
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“Beasts are actually quite plentiful here, in the winter,” one Velgein had explained to me. “As cold as it gets, it is much worse further north, and the beasts migrate down from there in vast numbers. They make for easy hunting, and the cold keeps the meat from spoiling, so it is actually easier to feed ourselves then, even when plants do not grow at all.”
The meat-and-potato style of diet, combined with the hard living and the need to do everything by hand, meant the average Velgein was big and strong. I suspected having no magic meant that all the power they gained in leveling up went towards their health and their physical bodies. I watched in slightly jealous awe as they easily rolled huge orbs of metal and stone back to the refinery. Even with my skill-enhanced strength, it would have been a massive feat to accomplish the task with the ease the northerners displayed. Once rolled to their destination, the stone case was cracked, and the iron oxide within was shoveled into carts that carried it on for smelting.
Moving through the foundry, the blazing heat overwhelmed me despite the cool air outside. I watched the iron get loaded into blast furnaces with coal or coke as fuel and some kind of flux to bind the slag. Beyond the blast furnaces, I saw molten metal being poured into molds for further forging down into weapons and armor.
It was clear that without magic to lean on, the Velgeins had instead advanced through technological development, advancing their metalworks farther than I had seen anywhere else in the world. Even after a decade of being oppressed by Horuth, they were still quite advanced. I could not help but wonder what their civilization would have looked like if they had been free to grow. From what I could learn from the older freedom fighters, Velgein communities had been fairly simple, but happy.
Despite that, they had advanced regular ironworking into steel manufacturing, and from what I understood had been doing it for generations. That helped them make stronger weapons and tools, which increased their quality of life and standard of living, and yet their society did not seem to advance much further beyond that.
There was a parallel between this and what I had observed from magic development in Horuth. Small bursts of change and development dotted long periods of unchanging repetition. When it came to technology, that could potentially just have been the pace of pre-industrial civilization as it budded into something more advanced. Perhaps, if the Velgeins could be taught to utilize coal and coke not just for steel manufacturing but for energy production, they would increase their rate of technological development and become a mighty force.
Yet, setting aside the present issue of the war with Horuth, it sounded like the Velgeins simply made steel and otherwise lived a very simple, subsistence lifestyle. I had seen a similar lack of creativity with the magical concepts and technology in Horuth.
Perhaps steelmaking came from another reincarnated soul, like me?
The thought gave me pause. It was something I had wondered about the creation of magic circles in the south, which displaced the previous methods of magic.
I knew that I was different from the people of this world. I developed skills that I had never otherwise seen and I had received them in ways that broke what little understanding I had of the logic of this reality. My whole presence here had broken my understanding of the logic of my own original reality, but it had happened, and as such, was a fact of life in this world. That did not mean my reincarnation here was unique or special. In fact, it was significantly more likely that it was, to some degree, a regular occurrence. It was not so common that I had encountered others with souls that were non-native to this world, but there was a whole world to explore with an unknown number of people living on it, and generations of people had lived here before me.
My thoughts were interrupted by a Velgein freedom fighter running over to me, rushed but not panicked. “Golchev wants to see you,” he said, pausing briefly to catch his breath. I nodded, and the rebel soldier continued on to his next task. With a sigh, I headed back out of the foundry and headed back towards the resistance’s planning grounds.
* * *
“Pilus,” the leader of the freedom fighters addressed me as I entered the room.
“Golchev.”
A crude map was spread out on the table which Golchev and a few other Velgeins stood around. I recognized them as some of the leaders of various cells of the resistance. The map was not accurate to the geography of the north, but was a general representation of the towns and Horuthian presence of the area.
“With this victory, we’ve pushed back most of the oppressors from our towns and villages. Those that escaped imprisonment have fled back to the Horuthian base camp at the mountain pass to the south.”
“That’s great,” I said, relaxing a bit. Hopefully, they would pull back to the capital south of the mountains before winter set in. I could probably collapse the mountains on either side of the pass, obstructing the way back, and this whole unexpected chapter of my second life could be over.
Golchev nodded. “It is an opportunity. All our enemies are in one place. With your help, we can strike and defeat th–”
I held up a hand, interrupting the enormous Velgein man. As was the case for most of his people, Golchev was tall, muscular, and imposing. Like all Velgeins, his hair was albino-white, but he wore it cropped down to his scalp, displaying a nasty scar along his head. He was surprisingly young for a rebel leader, though he held a gravitas that betrayed the severity of his experiences in life so far. His pale eyes narrowed at me, not particularly happy to be interrupted by a small child. I held myself straight without withering under the heavy glare of the tough-looking rebel leader.
“I joined with you to help defend and free Velgeins. I believe you have the right to freedom from oppression. But I’m not helping you take offensive action against my countrymen. With winter coming, they may fall back on their own. We can–”
Golchev lifted his hand in turn, a smirk on his face, and I pressed my lips together, as annoyed to be interrupted as he had been.
“Our scouts report they are settling in for the winter. The Horuthians won’t pull back. They will hold the pass and reinforcements will come in the spring, and they will attempt to retake our lands.”
“If they try, I will help you stop them. But I will not engage in an offensive strike.”
“You foolish child,” Golchev growled. “If they resupply and reinforce themselves, countless more Velgein lives will be lost! We should finish this now!”
“Then finish it on your own,” I snapped back, my patience with the man breaking. “The kingdom is in the wrong, but most of those soldiers aren’t evil, they’re just… people, like you and me. People trying to find a way to support themselves and their family. I have to give them a chance to change their mind and withdraw. I won’t help you just slaughter them. Enough people have died already.”
“They won’t change,” Golchev said, eyes darkening. “They have to be defeated, or they will kill us all. Do you really want that blood on your hands?”
An angry heat started to build up in me at Golchev’s words. Blood on my hands? There will be blood on them either way! I would not be complicit in murdering even more Horuthians just because they had the potential to kill more Velgeins. Memories of the mages I had cut down and the prisoner lives I had watched the northerners dispassionately end haunted me just as equally as the faces of the oppressed Velgeins hurt and killed by the kingdom. Weighing the possibility of future deaths against guaranteed deaths in this offensive, I made my decision.
“No, but I don’t want the Horuthian blood on my hands either. I will not help you with an offensive push.”
Golchev sneered in disgust, his eyes hardening. “Fine. Dismissed.”