CH1011

With pain gripping him, he shoved the feeling to a distant corner of his mind to instead focus on what he could see around him, he and the rest having been deposited in the heart of a dense forest, with Hentath’s thoughts telling him that at least they hadn’t been brought far. A handful of kilometers from the village at most, but still a devastating separation from the safety he’d wanted for them, with trouble not ending there.

“Ben, your leg!” Delair screamed, his student seeing him on the ground like the rest of them yet not just there from the fall. He had been the last to come through, rushing in when he clearly hadn’t been wanted, and with the portal closing around him as he went, separating the two conjoined spaces, everything below his left knee had been left on the other side.

“Ignore it,” he told her, materializing a tight wrap around the stump to keep the blood loss down before creating a prosthetic to stand on as he forced himself up. “Is anyone else injured?”

A look around showed that while some wounds they’d already received had worsened, the siren missing a limb of her own was bleeding more heavily, being the worst of all among them, it still wasn’t to the point that none of them would be able to manage, leaving options he hadn’t expected to get as he reached out around him with his soul, finding no demons within his range.

Yet, at least.

“Alright, everyone who can, get moving. The village is just southwest of us. When it gets a bit clearer, I’ll see about speeding up our progress.”

With how dense the woods were, he didn’t want to fly them through it yet, wanting at least a few minutes for his mana to regenerate while at the same time keeping an eye out for any traps. They had been brought out there, yet he could see no immediate risk for it, leaving only the question of why.

If whatever demon’s doing this saw them as weaker options than me then the goal may have just been to get them away from me and to start picking them off after so the fact that I got here too might be throwing a wrench in that plan, he considered. If not though, then I’m not sure what the delay is. Doesn’t seem like this is a trap to get me away from the village by tricking me into following them, but I still lack information. Information and a leg. Fucking hell, when am I going to finally get pain resistance?

As things were, the way he handled pain wasn’t so much resisting it as it was compartmentalizing, a fraction of his mind spent screaming and agonizing about it in his head, even if what was relegated to it wasn’t even a percent of a percent of his totality. Still, the ultimate goal was to one day be able to properly resist the effects of the injuries he’d gain instead of just push them away and that eventual success just couldn’t come fast enough, all while he forced himself to ignore that he might never get that one precious skill.

That was a long worn out concern by that point though, the majority of himself was focused on the real priority of everyone else’s safety as he worked, examining their thoughts and the world around them through their senses, using all he held as well to keep track of anything that could go wrong. Every noise, every rustling leaf, every breeze was all being processed in his head while he took stock of the forest around them in preparation for whatever would come and finally got it as a portal opened up above their heads and demons poured out, bringing screams to some in his group that he ignored. Only seven of them, the demons were dead before they hit the ground, ripped to pieces from the wrath of his magic and harmlessly tossed to the side.

“Keep going,” he told them, making sure he sounded confident. “Don’t worry, I’ll protect all of you, so ignore anything else and just focus on moving.”

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