Chapter 7
“Please, Husband. Hold still, or you’ll lose your arm!”
Alex’s hasty flight became a careful glide back down to the desert sands as he noticed his friends tending to the wounded caravanners.
For all that his heart broke to see so many grieving families, he felt a sense of relief as well that the casualties hadn’t been far worse.
Yet for every caravanner who had gotten off with the lightest of injuries, spear thrusts to limbs that hadn’t pricked deep enough to critically injure or kill before their assault was interrupted, there was an equal number who had been grievously wounded.
Alex’s gaze then fell upon all of those groaning and writhing in obvious pain, being tended to by none other than Nili, Zichen, and Sunlay.
For all that Alex understood the need for sharp priorities in these final hours when an entire city skirted peril, he couldn’t help but be grateful that, in the end, his friends had decided to back him up.
Even after all they had been through. While Nili and the others focused on healing, her husband and the male wujen Anjen stood careful watch over them.
Alex frowned, noting that Quing Da’s guandao was covered in gore.
He paused to truly take in the killing field that was the desert sands sprayed with blood, gore, and fallen bodies.
And not all of them had been struck down by the bull-stopping thrusts and cleaving blows of his fangtian ji, either.
Enough of the disguised soldiers bore the telltale sweeping slashes of Quing Da’s favored weapon to make it painfully clear that Alex hadn’t cleared the battlefield nearly as well as he had thought, even if the caravanners still had armed men of their own.
Yet it was those stalwart defenders who were the most grievously wounded, the closest to death, who had been triaged to receive care last of all.
His friends were focusing on the patients they could hopefully save, not on those who would heal on their own or were beyond whatever healing aid they could give.
Alex’s features tightened when he saw that armed caravanners weren’t the only ones who had been mortally wounded.
A mother was sobbing over her shuddering child, tiny hands unable to hold back the blue-gray streams of intestines spurting from the mortal wound.
Alex couldn’t suppress his horrified shudder, recognizing the soft brown eyes of the very girl he had been just a heartbeat too late to save.
His ears then caught a dying gasp as he spotted a dark-skinned Ruidian woman with an ochre jewel upon her sweat-covered brow.
Perhaps she was the one who had guarded the caravan with a storm of sand and wind.
Yet now the only wind was the breeze rustling Alex’s brow as the fallen jewel master’s eyes widened with oncoming death, her breathing rapidly fading to a dying wheeze.
“Fan!” the mother sobbed, tears splashing upon her daughter’s dying cheeks, before she instinctively looked up at the presence covered in gore looming over her, radiating fearsome potency, and holding out salvation in his hands.
“May I?” The only words Alex had time for, immediately acting as the woman just began to dip her head, knowing he had only seconds.
Alex allowed a globe of water to form on the tip of his finger, surrounding and cleansing the grit free of burst entrails even as he used the water to gently contain and compress the now gathered ropes of intestine before carefully forcing it back into the dying child’s abdominal cavity, paying no heed to multiple interface messages flashing across the back of his mind.
For all that his gaze was tender, his grip was like steel when the little girl screamed and thrashed before shuddering as shock left her utterly breathless, her screams replaced with her mother’s desperate cry.
Then and only then did Alex dare to place a few calibrated drops from the crimson vile he had claimed from the Silver-tier wujen he had so recently decapitated.
A potion whose potency Alex knew all too well.
If anything, the child’s thrashing grew more desperate before she finally collapsed in her mother’s arms.
“Fan!” the mother screamed in despair before horrified sorrow turned into a look of wonder as her child opened her eyes, gazing with disbelief at the gut wound that was now no more than an ugly pink scar.
“Mommy?”
Alex could spare no time for the woman’s joyful sobs, immediately turning to the Ruidian whom even now he sensed slipping away with her dying breath.
Alex gazed into amber eyes the same shade as her jewel that had known their share of bitterness, sorrow, triumph, and joy.
A young woman eager to find her fortune as a delver and to honor her clan, making the smart choice to earn coin while embracing safety in numbers by escorting a caravan all the way to Wanshi.
The final flickering thoughts of a dying woman who was jolted to horrified awareness when a blood-covered palm smacked against her forehead and claimed her for all time.
Slave Node successfully accessed.
You have successfully formed a party with Rachel Lu!
Warning! Detrimental neural cascades are in effect. Neural matrices must be stabilized within 17 seconds or party member will be lost!
Current party members have participated in shared experience point accrual. Inter-party experience points may be freely exchanged and manipulated!
You have authorized RESTORE TO SAVE STATE.
You have successfully directed claimed potency of Slave Node Lu0866.
Additional potency needed.
You have successfully channeled personal potency into Lu0866.
Party member’s neural matrix has been successfully stabilized!
The air filled with a woman’s high-pitched scream as Rachel Lu stumbled to her feet in wide-eyed horror, her eyes darting around with animal-like terror that immediately muted to confusion, then exhausted sobs moments later.
Alex gave the confused and clearly shaken young woman his gentlest smile, solemnly passing her a fresh water flask. “Are you all right?”
She blinked, lurching back for an eyeblink before furrowing her brow in confusion, as if having no idea why she would be horrified of him… before taking in with growing dismay the carnage all around them.
“What by all the desert sands happened?”
She had a soft, husky voice that Alex thought suited her slender form.
Her skin was darker than most Ruidians, even those belonging to this desert.
Her complexion, high cheekbones, and epicanthic folds made her look far more like a true-blooded native than a Ruidian, to the point that she could have easily passed as a local, save for her eyes and the jewel now sparkling proudly and brightly in the center of her forehead that she made no effort to hide.
Alex grinned. Now that the fear of a death forever erased from her psyche had passed, her twinkling amber eyes were filled with genuine curiosity and a joy of life, her healthy physique radiating a vibrancy that made it clear that her clan’s liberal intermingling of bloodlines had been to their most definite benefit.
“Exactly what it looks like. An ambush.” Alex gazed fondly at the little girl he had saved, now wrapped in the tender arms of her teary-eyed mother.
Only then, after finding solace in the two lives he had already saved, did he force himself to examine the other critically wounded, ignoring the merely mildly injured, for all that they were now looking his way with an odd mixture of both fear and wonder.
“Fortunately the good guys won, and the raiders paid the ultimate price.”
The young Ruidian’s lips pressed tightly together, her pert features furrowing as she rubbed her temple. “Why? Why can’t I remember anything?” She shook her head in dismay as Alex rapidly made his way to a grizzled caravanner who looked just seconds away from dying.
“Timon!”
The caravanner, hands holding his own entrails as he wheezed for agonized breath, flashed a weary smile the panicked Ruidian woman’s way. “Don’t be lookin’ so crestfallen, Rachel. That sand ward of yours bought us the time we needed. Time for help to arrive. You did good, girl.”
Rachel’s obvious confusion turned to renewed alarm. “Timon, hold on, we’ll get you to a healer! We’re less than a mile from the city… aren’t we?”
This earned a rueful chuckle, the man not bothering to resist when Alex effortlessly ripped open the well-worn jack of bronze plates that hadn’t done nearly enough to protect the old caravan guard, exposing the ugly wound it hid.
“I’m afraid it’s a bit late for that, girlie. But at least I skewered the bastard who did this to… By Long Wang’s Hammer, what are you doing?”
The man’s words cut off as his eyes rolled back, Alex effortlessly holding the man’s sturdy limbs as he bucked and thrashed while Alex methodically gathered the man’s spilled entrails and cleaned them in a fresh ball of pristine water he’d formed, before carefully forcing it all back in the gaping abdominal wound.
Only then did he sprinkle a few drops from the crimson healing potion he was determined to use as sparingly as possible.
Two gut wounds in under ten minutes. Alex definitely wasn’t going to review the snarky interface messages he knew were waiting for him, for all that such were exactly the types of wounds where the victim might not die immediately but their doom was all but assured, without the most supremely gifted healers around to save them.
Yet save them both Alex was determined to do, even if he had needed to hold his patient down while Timon screamed and thrashed, before he finally collapsed with an exhausted sob, gazing down at his own puckered scar with awed disbelief before turning his gaze up to Alex with a look of hope and reverence that made Alex wince.
“Honored hero, thank you! Thank you for my life! Please forgive my, ah, bloody hells!”
The man paled and groaned.