Fate Points - Ch 60 (Patreon)

Tom’s eyes did not stop moving as he searched for enemies.

His hand smacked into Clare’s shoulder and Healing Tranquillity triggered.

She was alive.

Time slowed down, but even with that bonus Tom knew he needed to hurry. Not only was she bleeding out he was in the middle of a war zone. He assessed her injuries critically. The carotid artery was severed. He focused his power there to close it. A couple of other large blood vessels were also torn up. Those he cauterised to stop her from losing more blood. They would need remedial work later, but Clare could do that herself. The missing tooth could wait as could the flesh wounds.

She would survive.

Four mana completed the fixes he had earmarked.

For a moment, he hesitated. The ferret had also slashed her stomach and her intestines were hanging out. Blood loss in the area was low. If he left the wound untended, it would take more power later. That didn’t worry him. Then there were the psychological implications of her waking and having to shove them back inside her. Probably not a concern, Tom decided. He had done that to himself multiple times, and she had gone through the trial as well. Finally, he considered the physical time required to push the dangling bits back in.

They were in a battle zone.

There was no time.

He dropped his hand for her shoulder having spent less than half a second in triage because of the incredible time-dilation that Healing Tranquillity provided. With his spear, he turned to face the enemies to kill more and protect Clare’s unconscious form.

A fighter in front of him fell.

Tom leapt forward.

Zap

Thrust

Zap,

Kick. The butt of his spear smacked into a third monster, knocking it away. A fourth sprang at him.

Zap.

It sailed through the air for a moment its muscles unresponsive so it could not twist away or block his blow with its claws. His spear did to it what the other ferret had done to Clare. Disembowelling it.

Deliberately, he stepped next to and partly on the face of the man who had fallen. His ankle pressed against the fallen man’s nose.

Healing Tranquillity.

It was almost like his patient had briefly been thrown into a man sized blender. Throat, Quads, the entire right side, including two ribs, had been opened up.

Triage only, Tom reminded himself.

Fourteen mana streamed out.

A ferret was flying through the air.

Lightning Steps flared automatically and Tom’s foot kicked off the man probably hard enough to leave both bruises and burn marks. He rocketed across the space and skewered the monster before it could land and savage someone else.

The spear caught in the rib cage, and with a thought both ferret and spear disappeared into his soul storage. Then a moment later, now separated the spear reappeared in his hands and the ferret fell dead to the ground. Grimly, he kept his weapon spinning ready to attack anything hostile that moved while assessing the state of play. He was surprised to find no immediate enemy assaulting him. “Victims to the centre. Protect the healers.” Michael thundered.

Tom’s eyes skipped over the landscape, fearing what he would see, but there were no ferrets threatening them with those he could see were fleeing. Tom glanced at the carnage. He had killed six or was it seven and he had not been the only one cut loose. Ferret corpses were everywhere, in some spots piled three to four deep. There was no time to count, but it looked like well over a hundred had been killed. Two per standard fighter with a couple of standouts taking out more.

“Harry, get mana regens down.” Michael continued to snap orders. “Scouts on watch.”

The battle was over Tom realised. He did not need to stay on full alert. That felt weird. In the trial, in the same situation, he would have done one of two things. If he was injured, he would run to ensure that he was clear before other predators were attracted to the blood and if he was uninjured, he would process the bodies as soon as possible to be ready to carry out a fighting retreat when something larger came.

Here, with this group, it was different. Instead of doing all that he was supposed to be healing.

With a flicker of a thought, the spear in his hand vanished, and he allowed some of his battle focus to lapse. Everlyn caught his eyes and the axe she had got out of the GOD’s trial was drenched in the bright blood. She gave him a thumbs up before she turned back to her job of preventing another ambush from hitting them.

She was fine and uninjured.

A groan of pain interrupted his thoughts, and with a jerk he focused on his immediate responsibility. Saving lives.

His eyes scanned those who had fallen looking for people that required his immediate aid. Lightning steps propelled him forward with the high ranked skill almost doubling his movement speed.

Kneel, then push his fingers under the helm to create skin to skin contact.

Healing Tranquility triggered and let him assess everything he needed to know.

A vein in the arm was pierced.

He closed it.

There was more to do. Her chest was caved in on the side. To Tom’s uneducated medical sense it felt like a mace had hit it, but his instincts told him the damage was magical in nature. Most likely one of the high level ferrets had possessed a ramming ability and had head butted her to do that level of harm. The ribs had shattered, shards of bone had pierced the lung, and then the lung had collapsed as it filled with blood. The traditional method to heal would be drained and then pump in air to inflate, but his approach was simpler. First, he shifted the bone fragments back into sort of the right position. Tiny temporary growths secured them in place. Then he stimulated the blood in the lungs and pushed it out to the rest of her body. Re-using the blood rather than dumping it.

On his prompting, she breathed in and with a bit of magical support; the lung inflated. Then he pumped in raw healing. Her body guided the whole thing. They closed the cuts and the bones partially fused together.

Three weeks of healing completed in a moment.

He moved to the next body. Lighting feet propelling him two controlled metres in a single step.

He touched this man.

Dead.

Then Tom switched his focus to the body next to the dead man. Tom could see bone and not a glimpse of the entire skull from just over the forehead to the ear had been exposed. A section as large as his hand. The poor guy was probably also dead, but since he was there he checked.

Alive?

What? Surprise ran through him, but professionalism stopped any knee-jerk reactions. The man was alive but dying and Tom only had thirty mana left. Possibly enough to save him… Should he? Wouldn’t it be more profitable to find people only starting the dying process rather than one basically in the grave. That might save extra lives.

The chest under his hand rose ever so slightly. The man gasped in pain.

Healing Tranquillity had slowed everything down, and his mind was already assessing the injuries. Everlyn had been fine, and he had noticed none of his friends being injured. If he abandoned this man, then he would die.

That was a certainty.

If he left to save others… There might be no one else in danger of death who needed him. He would stay there were of course other healers out there.

Tom’s consciousness flicked over the extensive injuries. A ferret had gone through his stomach and from what he could tell organs were missing, probably eaten. What he suspected was the man’s liver had a large chunk bitten out of it. A secondary attack had shredded his leg and left claw marks on the femur, and the third assault had almost scalped the man. That injury, while comfortably the most gruesome was the least concerning. After all, fixing it would only require the replacement of some skin.

Tom began his triage. Automatically as his mind and skills influenced the man’s body his physical hand moved. First the flap of skin on the head. Tom flipped it up and smoothed it over. He pushed down on the fuzzy blond hair, spreading his fingers to stretch out the skin to cover as much of the previous area as possible.

It was a bad healing technique and would let infection get in that Tom knew would need to be burnt out later, but for now it was a quick and dirty fix. Mana fused sections together like a glue gun in a primary school project. The original put back where it had been torn from, but done so poorly that everyone knew at a glance.

His mind skipped over the stomach. That was a problem for later.

As was the clawed bone. He spotted a chunk of the man’s leg on the ground. Tom snatched it up and frowned at the dirt upon it.

He connected his thoughts to his summons and the lightening elemental crackled over the dirty areas of meat to sterilise it. The flesh looked slightly cooked, but Tom shoved it into the man’s leg. Capillaries went through the sterilised layer and into the living stuff below it. Blood flowed to support the briefly separated chunk of flesh. The connections were far from ideal and he was going to need Andros’ help later to cut out the dead flesh, but for now it was returned to a semi-functional state.

Not perfect, but that was triage.

Two issues down he focused on the last. There was nothing he could do about the damaged organs but the wounds he could fix. His mana bottomed out as he fixed the most grievous of the remaining issues.

He may have been mana less, but Healing Tranquillity was still in play, so he checked the overall health of the man.

Stable.

He had been successful. Despite that, he did not get up and instead sat there with his hand on the other fighter’s forehead. Thirty mana recharge per minute, give or take. Every two seconds he released a pulse of healing. Closing a little more of the chest wound with general undirected healing and he wishing he knew more about medicine. What was missing and damaged? You could live without kidneys. What about half a liver?

Everything might be for nothing.

Harry was next to him, drawing a ritual around him. “Get Andros.”

Harry nodded but continued his ritual and before he finished Andros appeared.

“What?”

“Under the scalp–”

“And the leg.” Andros interrupted. His magic worked like a scalpel, and Tom felt the dead and foreign material get cut away and left a gap for him to heal once more.

Between the regeneration of each drop of mana, he listened to what was happening around him.

“Two dead.”

“Michael screwed up. We were too aggressive. A scout should be in charge.”

“It was the fucking warriors they just let the monsters waltz into the centre.”

“Did you see how agile they were, it was the leaderships’ fault.”

Tom sent another pulse into the man’s stomach and further bits healed. When he turned his attention outwards, he sent his perception elsewhere. He didn’t need to hear people grumbling.

“I got a title. It was common.”

“All you scouts seemed to.”

The person laughed. “Only most of us and some none scouts too.”

He sent another pulse of magic into his patience and remembered the ding that had occurred just before the craziness of the ferret attack. That and how all the ferrets had become visible simultaneously.

He shut his eyes, and he appeared in the system room. Distantly, he felt lighter. The ache on his back and a similar patch on his leg were no longer bothering him. Tom flashed in annoyance in himself. Apparently, he was slightly injured and hadn’t even noticed.

“Show any new titles.”

New Title

Camouflage Piercing - Stone: Twenty percent chance per second of seeing through stone based camouflage of still creatures, a hundred percent for moving. Effectiveness reduced by 75% for invisibility versions till the first time the species’ illusion is pierced.

Awarded for: Awarded for piercing a tier 3 invisibility spell without using magical aids.

· Common Title. Competition Rank: Greater than a thousand.

Tom opened his eyes in the real world and spent the two manas he had regenerated. It was a nice title but presumably easy to get based on both its common status and that over a thousand people had already achieved it.

Tom’s attention focused on the warrior that he was healing. There was nothing much he could do. The wounds were healed, admittedly with significant scaring on both the scalp and leg. If it mattered to the warrior, then Tom was sure than he could work out a solution with Andros and a different healing.

The blond man’s eyes were open, staring blankly up at the sky.

“How are you feeling?” Tom asked.

His eyes flicked to Tom briefly before hurriedly looking away. “I was dead.”

Tom smiled sadly. Psychologically, almost dying was a big deal and one book he had purchased in the trial had talked about the benefit of enforcing rest after a healing no matter how unnecessary physically it might have been. “Only almost. You need to lie still for a while.”

“Why?”

“Doctor’s orders.”

“You’re a doctor?” The warrior asked, while refusing to make eye contact.

“No, but that advice comes from a medical book.”

“I was dead.”

“No.”

“Could anyone else have healed me?”

Tom thought for a moment. “Yes.” It didn’t matter if it wasn’t true it was what he needed to know. “Now rest. Ten minutes not moving.” He glanced up and saw a cloud of insects spiralled towards him.

Fuck.

He leapt to his feet, raised his hands to unleash Spark, and then realised that his mana was empty and he needed to rely on outside help.

Kill, he ordered.

The elemental leap off his head and charged the descending mass.

Boom!

The entire cloud lit up in a display a sapient thunderstorm would have been proud of.

Small burnt bodies fell around him without a trace of experience.

Tom grimaced.

A massive unnecessary overkill. A lapse of judgement. The brutality of the recent fight had pushed him off centre.

They were flies.

Ordinary flies that would have been unremarkable back on earth. He was jumpy and not thinking. Of course, lower ranked scavengers were going to be attracted to the bloodshed.

“Jumpy.” Everlyn asked, patting him on the back.

“Of course not.”

She laughed at him and said nothing and stepped up and linked her arm around his waist.

Tom now that he was not actively healing studied everything. The ferrets were gone and as yet nothing new had replaced them.

That wouldn’t last.

The crafters were already hard at work butchering the corpses.

And humans. His eyes saw three bodies being stripped of their clothes, two women and a man. It was brutally pragmatic, but had to be done. Off to the side, Keikain was creating a hole for the entrails, bones, organs and flesh that they couldn’t use.

Three dead in their first skirmish outside of the wasps.

He swallowed.