Chương 20: Chapter 14 - Healing

The group took a temporary rest not too far from the battle site, hidden along the rocky cliff face they'd seen from a distance that morning. A thick set of conifer trees, running along where the cliff's shade ended, blocked them from any prying eyes. The sun was high in the sky at that point in the afternoon, but it hadn't gotten any warmer. The air still carried the thin, almost watery chill of early morning, like there should have been fog, but there wasn't. It was worse in the shade.

The rock seemed perpetually damp, with the sand at its base sitting thick and heavy, like the parts of a beach submerged daily by the tide. Plus, as they were at the top of one of the hills, the wind ran through the trees often enough that the air never quite settled. Around the packs, which had been left on the ground for a moment while people attended to their clothing—and in Volrick's case, the cut along his left arm—the bone-like daggers were stuck into the ground.

All twelve, to avoid leaving them behind as evidence. Alyssia had been able to mend Karina's bandages and the tear in her pants, stitching the fabric together into the "shape it remembered." Only after she'd done that did she attend to Volrick, taking his injured arm in her hands and laying a glowing palm on it. Healing took longer than Karina had expected. The pair sat there in mostly silence while she grabbed some of the rations to tide herself over until their actual stop for camp in the evening.

Then she found a place beside the packs where the stone was dry and brushed away the loose grit before sitting. From there, she could see pieces of the opposite hillside through the trees. If they wanted to reach Whiteshackle in a reasonable timeline, they had to keep moving. Karina's burns hadn't receded much since the fight with the Enrashi.

While she'd never gotten any on her torso, she'd "used up" most of her arms and legs in the fight, leaving her limbs with that unnatural char, along with the persistent spot on her right cheek. For the first part of their sitting in silence, Karina tried to measure how things were covered, finding what she guessed was about an inch and marking it with ink from Alyssia's quill. She guessed at the time by counting seconds as she could, and then did the same experiment a second time with wildly different results.

Either her mana regeneration wasn't consistent—Alyssia couldn't tell her because it varied from class to class—or it manifested inconsistently on her skin. Without numbers to tie it to, what really mattered was that she wasn't recovering quickly, and while Ember Call had surely allowed her to summon much more fire, controlling it for any amount of time was still far out of reach. Though, as long as she could light something on fire quickly enough, how much time did she need?

Unable to practice her spell without wasting more mana, Karina turned to the other task at hand while she waited. Pulling out Alyssia's notebook while the Priestess continued working on Volrick. A few fallen needles had caught in the folds of her bag. She picked them out before setting the notebook across her knees, then pinned the open page with her thumb.

She quickly checked the numbers in her Fates and sketched them down into the book, writing down each of her new values, and almost scratching out her current running theory for Firestealer. [Firestealer - 44/200] it It had doubled when she cast the Ember Call spell. Some of which tracked within the rules she'd written. Half of the 10 she needed to ascend Basic Spellcasting, and then 10 for completing it.

Adding on the 2 points she'd gotten from progression in Basic Pyrokinesis and most of the growth tracked on her current scale. By her math, six points were missing, but that would need to wait until Alyssia set up a barrier at camp and she was able to ascend Basic Spellcasting to its second level. Karina tapped the back end of the quill on the page—a thin, wispy, mostly black feather with a wooden core—before shutting the book.

Even early into her progression through the Fates, she was starting to see how complicated managing her growth could get. Class levels seemed simple enough. Juggling the different Fates, especially once you needed to slot some out, would take major focus, especially as the Fates were watching everything you did. Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences. How easy would it be to lose experience because the wrong fate was slotted during the wrong moment during a quiet day?

Tucking the book back away in her bag, Karina went over to check on Alyssia and Volrick just as the former was checking his hand, examining where the shallow wound had run along his arm and flexing each of his fingers in turn.

"Karina," Alyssia began, "Good timing. We should be good to go. We should keep moving if we want to reach Whiteshackle by tomorrow nightfall."

"Quick question about that," she asked.

"If Volrick lived in Whiteshackle as a child, that means that other people lived there too, right?" Volrick nodded as he stood up and stretched.

"Yeah, most of the protection of my dad, but there were a couple of people, not as many as there should have been in a village that size, but—You couldn't blame people for leaving when the demons started getting close."

"Wasn't the first time," Alyssia said.

"It wasn't the first time?" Karina echoed.

"Nah, Whiteshackle's one of those places," Volrick said.

"It's close enough to the front that people will live there for a while, and then, when the demons have the advantage, they'll take the city. When the heroes have the advantage, they'll push them back and... well if it's been long enough—""People move in," Alyssia finished for him.

"Why would they move back there?"

"Good soil," Volrick said, "that was what Dad said at least. If you ask me, it's really just that people were used to it." He looked out over the horizon to the South towards their goal.

"My dad lived there, and it was safe again. I might consider it."

"That's insane."

"Maybe," Alyssia said, "but you come from a peaceful world, Karina. We don't even know how long the war against the demons has been going on." In the moment she had as Volrick gathered his things, Alyssia turned her magic to a small nick on her palm, which began to weave itself shut at an agonizing pace.

"You don't know?"

"Been a couple thousand years, at least," Volrick said.

"And every once in a while, everything goes sideways—""The Archives get lost," Alyssia added.

"If it weren't for heroes like you, we would have fallen a hundredfold by now." Karina let the conversation die there, because, while their answers had seemed earnest, none of what Alyssia had been saying made sense. The war couldn't have been going on for thousands of years. Did they understand how long a thousand years was? It was unfathomable. Everything should have changed in a thousand years. Technology should have run over itself again and again. Magic should have been revolutionized.

It—"I know it can be demoralizing to hear," Alyssia said as she tested her hand to see if the flesh beneath her skin had finished sewing itself together.

"But I believe in you, hero. If we didn't believe in the heroes, why would we keep summoning them?" Karina blinked and then shook her head. Alyssia was assuming that she thought they couldn't win, as opposed to simply trying to understand how they hadn't already won by now? Or lost, as it were.

"Would love to keep the chatter going," Volrick said now that he had all of the knives he'd scattered around the camp back in his possession.

"But if we want to get close to Whiteshackle soon we need to keep moving... let alone staying ahead of anything that comes chasing after us."

"You think we're being followed?" Alyssia asked.

"Well, hero here isn't exactly subtle. She leaves a bit of an aftermath."

"I've been known to scour a hillside," Karina offered, trying to lighten the fact that she made them shockingly easy to follow.

"Now, whether our demonic friends think we're worth chasing? That's another question entirely." He spun one of the bone daggers around before offering the handle to Karina.

"Just to keep by your side, in case you run out of mana again." She hadn't thought he needed to offer them considering she'd killed two of the Enrashi herself, but she nodded as thanks nonetheless.

"Why would they bother to chase us?" Alyssia asked. That felt like a stupid question, but she let the conversation play out between the people who understood how the demons worked.

"I don't know, she's burned a bunch of them down. Scouts go missing and there are more burns. Think they mig—" Alyssia shook her head.

"No?"

"No?" Karina asked.

"Look, it's obvious that a fire mage was involved in both fights," Alyssia said.

"But, it was only a couple of scouts and a pair of soldiers. Demons don't care."

"But wouldn't they want to find us and stop us from killing more of them?" Karina asked.

"They don't think that way unless there is a Matron of the Queen in the area," Alyssia said.

"Which there isn't." Volrick simply nodded at that, but Karina followed up.

"How do you know?"

"She doesn't," Volrick answered before turning out toward the Southern horizon.

"But if there is a Matron of the Queen somewhere nearby, then none of this really matters."

"Pardon?"

"Hero, I know Alyssia just said she believes in you, but if there's a Matron of the Queen here, we're all dead anyway."

"Only if she finds us," Alyssia added.

"So let's get moving. No more stops until nightfall."

"And even then," Volrick added before dropping off the small ridge below their outcrop and heading down the hillside. Whiteshackle by tomorrow nightfall, with answers in the city if they were lucky and a Matron of the Queen if they weren't. For a brief moment of hubris, Karina tried to understand how much experience that would give her. What would Firestealer say about burning what sounded like a general of the demon army? She wasn't ready now, but she knew at some point that she needed to know.