Chương 462: (455) 6.69. Can’t Forget You

With the fate of the trogums left in Guardian's three capable hands, Vin and Alka made their way out of the maze of tunnels back to the surface. Once there, finding Shia, Scule, and Reginald wasn't hard. All they needed to do was head toward the small mountain of bodies.

"Dear God," Vin muttered, eyeing up the heaps of trogums surrounding the rotting remains of Shia's Living Giant. Despite letting the spell end, if Shia didn't actively will the branches and wood to decay, the husk of her spell was simply discarded, like some sort of horrifying hermit crab.

"How many trogums did you guys go through?"

"I lost track after the first three hundred," Scule admitted, sitting atop Shia's shoulders as he waved at them. For her part, Shia was sitting crosslegged on the ground, her face pale as she nursed a mana potion.

"I take it you guys finished off the queen? The swarm suddenly stopped attacking and started rushing back into the tunnels after a few minutes of fighting. We figured that was her attempt to call them to her aid."

"Yep, queen's dead. And thank the Gods for that, I hate this place. I can't tell what any of them are saying!" Alka grumbled.

"Shia, are you alright?" Vin asked, stepping as carefully around the field of trogum corpses as he could. It said a lot about the kind of life he'd lived on Edregon up until now that he managed to keep his food down while walking through the utter carnage, though he wondered if the fact that their blood was a sickly green rather than a dark red helped with that.

"You don't look great."

"Scule is making light of it. The battle was a lot closer than you'd think," she said, shaking slightly as she looked around.

"There's not a lot of vegetation on this fragment, which meant I only had my personal mana and the mana stored within blossom to draw on. If you'd been even thirty seconds slower getting to the Rebel Queen… I don't want to think about what would have happened." Letting out an encouraging squeak, Reginald hopped over and rubbed his face against Shia's cheek. Snorting, Scule shook his head.

"You're strong for a rat, but I don't think you're 'drag Shia behind you' strong. At least not fast enough to escape an army."

"Still, thank you, Reginald," Shia smiled, petting the rat on the head with a finger.

"Just give me a couple of minutes to replenish my mana. I know none of us want to sit in all this gore any longer than we have to, but I'd rather not pass out trying to move about."

"Hold on, I think I can help with that," Vin admitted, moving in front of her and closing his eyes as he opened his core. First, he took a deep breath, reaching out and borrowing the mana from his surroundings. That was a big mistake. Vin nearly choked at the sheer quantity of death and blood that filled his senses, causing him to stumble and for Alka to grab his arm to keep him upright.

Waving her off, he steeled himself, parsing through the foreign mana as he brought it into his core and diluted it, making it his own. Seeing as he didn't have an affinity, the mana was as pure as it was ever going to be. That done, Vin let out his breath, venting his mana, but in a way he'd never tried before. Rather than just focusing on expelling mana from his body, he held his hands out toward Shia and focused on gently pushing it directly into her empty mana pool.

Cracking open his eyes, he smiled as Shia's eyes shot open and her jaw dropped, revealing her sharp teeth.

"Broken branches, what did you just do?!" she asked, dropping her mana potion and pressing at her chest.

"How did you do that?!"

"A trick I learned from the Whisperer," Vin chuckled, slowly repeating the process and shoving a bit more mana into Shia before he continued.

"And from the mana itself, I suppose."

"Look at this guy, all cool and special because he can talk to magic," Scule muttered, hopping onto Alka's shoulder and shaking his head.

"We're never going to hear the end of this, are we?"

"I certainly wouldn't shut up about it if I were Vin," Shia laughed, getting to her feet and grinning at them. The color in her face had been completely restored, and she looked better than ever.

"Wow, that refilled almost a third of my entire mana pool… Vin, that's crazy! My master never even hinted that something like that was possible! Do you think you could use that trick to help Erik speed up the recovery of the dryads?"

"Unfortunately, it doesn't work like that," Vin admitted.

"Magical beasts have a different relationship with mana than we do, and I'll be the first one to admit I don't have all that firm of an understanding of what it is I'm really doing. I'd probably do more harm than good if I tried."

"That's fair. From what he last told us things are going smoothly on that front already, so no sense in taking any unnecessary risks," Shia nodded.

"My thoughts exactly," Vin said, glancing around at the field of corpses one last time. He wanted to refill his own mana pool somewhat, but he'd rather not get another soul-full of death and blood if he could help it.

"Maybe we should get out of here? Let the dwarves know everything's fine? Honestly, I know we should probably check out the other fragments the trogums hit, but I think I need a break. I need to go see Frank at the very least. The glass shards in my head have turned into jagged marbles, which is a slight improvement, but still not all that great." Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

"I'm pretty certain we've earned a bit of a breather after, you know, saving potentially all of Edregon," Scule said, gesturing all around them to the hundreds of dead trogums.

"At the very least, I got a ton of experience from our fight. Managed to test out a few large-scale poison clouds. I'm feeling better prepared than ever for the battle for wave seven!" Vin groaned, scrunching his eyes tightly closed as he remembered to keep himself from shaking his head at the last second.

"Did you seriously have to bring that up now? I'm way too tired to think about that!" The team bickered and laughed with one another as they made their way out of the fragment and over to the dungeon once again. A quick trip through the Underside got them back to the dwarves, where Shia volunteered to explain everything that happened.

While she was doing that, Vin headed over to the fragment barrier he'd messed with, staring up in awe one last time as the sheer scale of the solid wall he'd convinced the mana to take on. It seemed the trogums had either already been moved elsewhere by the dwarves, had somehow wandered off on their own, or been collected by a nearby elite. Whatever the case, Vin was alone with the wall.

"Thanks for listening," he said, laying a hand gently against the solid barrier as he smiled at the solidified mana.

"Even if you almost killed me by accident, I don't hold it against you. I hope the next time I need to ask for your help with something, you won't hesitate to answer." It may have just been the setting sun reflected from the horizon, but the massive wall seemed to shimmer for a moment, the solid mana sparkling and dancing in the sunlight in response to his words. Smiling to himself, Vin turned and began the slow trudge up the wall, trusting in his enchanted boots to get him up there.

Walking a quarter mile up into the sky was no quick feat, but Vin didn't trust himself to remain conscious if he risked flipping his gravity around and shooting upward. Eventually, he reached his staff, and he paused to examine it more closely. The staff looked the same as always, the countless rings of differently colored wood glowing one after another as it pulsed from bottom to top.

The end of the staff was firmly planted in the solid wall of mana, just as he left it, and Vin somehow knew that if he refrained from removing the staff and just walked away, it would remain like this until the end of time. So strange how something that loves change is willing to allow a part of itself to remain static at the request of others… he thought, reaching out and gripping his staff. The wood was warm and comfortable under his hand, and his smile widened.

Steeling himself, Vin pulled the staff out of the wall as easily as if it had only been planted in a half-inch of mud. The moment he did so, the solid sheet of mana he stood on that stretched six miles from one end to another dissolved, returning to the nearly invisible barrier between fragments that it always had been. Vin instantly began plummeting through the sky, and he waited until the last second before casting Slow Fall, letting his spell bring him calmly to the ground.

Staff in hand, Vin returned to the dwarves, where he helped Shia tell the rest of what happened before taking his leave. The Whisperer was oddly silent during all this, which could only mean one thing. She'd mentioned before how there were certain things the mana supposedly didn't want her to tell him, and he had a feeling she was forcing herself to bite her tongue, lest she upset it.

He still didn't quite understand the strange relationship the Whisperer had with his newfound friend, but seeing as her very words carried the power of mana within them, it was safe to assume whatever she and mana had with one another was special in a way he might never see again. As much as he wanted to accept the dwarves' offer of a bed in the Burrow for the night, Vin wasn't kidding about his need to see Frank.

He felt a little better with every passing hour, but that wasn't saying much when it still felt like he had half an icepick lodged in his skull. Heading back to Terra ahead of his friends, Vin was only mildly surprised to find a certain someone waiting for him in the Underside mirroring Terra's fragment.

"Vin!" Lumel shouted from across the room, vanishing with a flash of purple before appearing directly in front of him. Right before she could throw her arms around him, she paused, her face contorting with worry as she looked at him.

"Are you okay? You look terrible! And you're covered in green stuff!"

"Ah… yeah, that's trogum blood," he said, grimacing at the realization that his clothes were completely stained in the stuff.

"Sorry, I would have cleaned up a bit, but it's been a hectic day. How are you?"

"I'm fine, that doesn't matter. Blood? Are you okay?" she repeated, hesitating before laying a cool hand against his cheek.

"And I don't just mean physically." Letting out a world-weary sigh, Vin stepped forward, planting his forehead into her shoulder as he wrapped his arms around the pulmon. He felt bad about potentially getting blood on her robes, but he was too tired to worry about that right now.

"I killed the matriarch of an entire race in order to stop them from going out and killing any more fragments than they already had," he said, feeling Lumel stiffen beneath him in shock. As she wrapped her own arms around him and pulled him closer, he kept going.

"Five whole fragments were slaughtered by her people, but it wasn't their fault. They were forced to follow her orders. Mental magic, and all that. But without their queen, they have the intelligence of small children. Thousands of them are going to die over the coming days because of what I did. I don't regret it, and I'd do it again in a heartbeat, but even so… It's just a lot, you know?"

"Vin…" Lumel hesitated, sounding like she wasn't sure exactly what to say. In the end, she said nothing, merely nodding and running her hands gently through his hair as she held him. That was exactly what Vin needed, and the two of them stood like that for a couple of minutes, enjoying the solitude and sanctity of the Underside as they took a break from the real world. Eventually, Vin sighed, stepping back as he smiled at his lifemate.

"Thank you. I really needed that. However, I also really need to pay Frank a visit. I took a mental magic attack a few hours ago and my head is still killing me. I know a trip to the hospital isn't exactly the most fun evening plans…"

"It's a date," Lumel smiled, taking his hand and giving it a reassuring squeeze as she leaned up and kissed him. Her lips were cool and soft against his own, and Vin all but melted into the kiss. All the recent, horrific memories he'd experienced seemed to fall away as he focused on the here and now. He was sad when she pulled away after a few seconds, and Lumel seemed to notice, because she giggled.

"I promise you'll get a whole lot more kisses than that later, but your head is more important. Frank first."

"Alright… but I'm going to hold you to that," Vin grinned, giving Lumel one last kiss on the forehead before they began walking toward the corridor that would lead them up to the Earthers' fragment.

"I just potentially saved all of Edregon! That deserves at least ten… maybe even twenty kisses, if you ask me! And not from Frank!"