CH635 Thera’s Perspective

The sounds of pain and death surrounded Thera as she did her best to focus on her work, moving from one patient to the next, doing her all she could to get each one healed and out to free up space for the next body that was going to want to fill it as she tried to do her part in emptying the area and easing the burden on the other healers around her.

Flesh, scale, carapace, she bent her power to assemble each example she saw and more, trying to bring each victim back to fighting shape as fast as she could while reaching out with her magic to ease the burdens for the other mages carrying out the same work and feeling like she was lost watching a sea of pain and death.

While she was there, they were able to keep up to some extent but when she left to fight it was only going to get worse again as the hospital fluctuated between barely manageable and widely over capacitated, all depending on where she needed to be as the second wave made her truly understand the weight that came with having a second tier skill.

With the world at its tipping point, power and responsibility went hand in hand. It was something she hadn’t been able to see in the first wave, but now, more than halfway through the second it felt like a weight threatening to crush her from trying to manage her time alone.

Even then it was getting near her return to the battlefield but with so many more injured, that meant leaving them. The other healers would do their best but plenty who were already waiting would die in the hours she was gone, another body to be stored away amongst a mountain of corpses, with fire mages coming around to burn them on mass, the resources needed to find out who each was and what funeral rites they followed simply non-existent compared to how better spent they’d be going towards the living.

It was a world going to hell and that meant there was no time to think of the dead.

Don’t think of anything, just work. She told herself as she applied her magic to a screaming man, burns covering most of his body in a way that left her surprised he’d survived whatever he’d been up against as dead skin fell away under her touch, revealing soft flesh in its place.

She was going to move on the second she was done but even once finished he still wailed in agony, leaving her to look him over one more time.

There’s nothing. She concluded after pushing her mana examination. His body is in perfect shape, so psychological then?

She didn’t feel equipped to help handle the mental harm that was beating down a world of people. There wasn’t going to be a single person on the planet who wasn’t at least a little traumatized by all of the death and destruction and trying to help him would have just meant getting him to a good enough shape to make him fight all over again.

But that’s exactly what I’m supposed to be doing.

There wasn’t the leeway to let people have their breakdowns, they needed bodies, so instead of leaving him be from there to let his mind find what calm it could she gently touched the side of his head, casting a subtle dark spell to help stabilize his thoughts.

A spell that did nothing. Still he screamed, still pain assaulted him from all sides, with neither his body nor his mind being the culprit.

His soul.

It wasn’t something she would have thought of if she hadn’t seen Ben go through the same thing but that was the last avenue that could have been causing such agony for him, leaving her with nothing she could do to help. From the way he yelled it seemed bad but she could only assume it would heal with time, nothing she could repair without being a soul mage herself.

There was nothing more she could do, and worse, her time was up. She needed to go fight and as her final act, she at least alerted another healer to the situation before leaving through the gate to whatever disaster waited beyond.

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It was the same scene she’d witnessed every time she went through a gate.

Sure, the locations were different, maybe the times of day too depending on the ones she went through, but most of it was blocked out by the horde of demons swarming through.