16. Aftermath

Several problems demanded Alistair’s attention at once. The rush of leveling still pulsed through Alistair’s mind. His surviving clones were wounded, one to the point of dying. The girl was not far away, crying in pain and terror. The road still held blood, broken earth, and all the evidence of what had just happened. Another clone was still traveling toward the port inside the first cart, and until that small thread of the plan ended naturally, dismissing it would only make the whole morning more suspicious.

Fortunately, Alistair had become very good at multitasking, and the first choice came easily. He dismissed every injured clone except Survivor. That body, though battered, was still the most useful and the least ruined, making it the best option for approaching the girl. The one headed toward the port remained active too.

Leveling had come at the perfect moment. He needed more bodies immediately. Without lingering over the decision, he opened his Guide and pushed one point into INT. The familiar internal shift followed immediately, bringing the stat to 6.

He could already feel the change in duration of the clones that came with the level. The new bodies would last much longer than before, but there was no time to test the exact limit. The road still had to be cleaned, the girl had to be treated, and the tavern had to receive an Alistair before anyone noticed his absence.

He acted. While Survivor limped toward the child, Alistair summoned two new clones and sent them out of town quickly. Then he changed back into the clothes he wore for work and forced out yet another clone, stretching his control nearly to its limit. The extra WIS made the strain survivable.

The new Shade clone headed toward La Table d’Or immediately.

Graceful rest was impossible for the main body now. Alistair remained where he was, half-hidden in the narrow place between buildings, cloaked and slumped against the wall. It was an undignified posture, but conserving his attention mattered more than pride.

By the road, Survivor had already reached the girl. He approached slowly, crouched at a careful distance first, and spoke before touching her.

“It’s all right,” he said, keeping his voice low and steady. “I’m trying to help you. I’m going to look at your injuries now. I’ll have to move you.”

The words barely calmed her. She was too frightened, hurt, and exhausted for that. Even so, saying them was necessary. Alistair knew that instinctively. Someone who had been stripped of choice did not recover by being handled like an object, even during a rescue. He could not give her real control yet, but he could at least tell her what he was doing.

Up close, she looked worse than she had from the room’s darkness. She was small for her age, thin to the point of fragility, with tangled dark hair stuck to her damp face. Her skin had the gray, unhealthy pallor of fear, bad sleep, cold, and the beginnings of fever. The sleeve of her dress was torn, her hands shook uncontrollably, and when she tried to pull in a full breath, the effort caught somewhere and faltered.

Survivor focused only on what he could treat. He focused on the obvious. Her wrists and ankles were rubbed raw. Her outer calf, by the look of it, had a bleeding cut, painful but not immediately fatal. One ankle was already swelling, twisted badly enough that standing on it would be misery. Bruising darkened her ribs, shoulder, and upper arm. She was cold, weak, and frightened out of her mind.

He tore strips from the ruined parts of her own clothing to improvise pressure wraps. The rough work was not pretty, but it slowed the worst of the bleeding. Then he ran back to the road, took the dead woman’s tunic and outer layers, and rushed back to cover the girl as best he could against the morning chill.

“Stay still,” he told her. “You’re safe for now. Breathe slowly.”

The words felt insufficient, but he had nothing better.

By then the other two clones had reached the scene. They paused only long enough to assess the scene: the dead woman on the road, the blood, the broken cart ruts, the disturbed brush. Then they moved. Without needing to speak, they took the woman by shoulders and legs and carried her off the road toward the pit where the male slaver had died.

They handled the body without gentleness. Alistair might have expected guilt once, or at least some flicker of hesitation at handling the dead this way. No guilt came. The woman had forfeited whatever human treatment she might once have deserved. They dumped her into the pit with the man and turned away without giving them a second glance.

One clone went immediately to the girl.

The other slipped behind a nearby tree and retrieved the shovel left there earlier. The tool had cost seventeen shards, which felt ridiculous when Alistair thought of how many small expenses had piled up in the last day alone. Lockpicks, knife, shovel, and cheap treatment supplies bought in haste. Each necessity ate into the future he wanted to build. He could only hope there would come a point when he already owned enough tools for this kind of work and did not have to buy a new piece of his life every time trouble appeared.

Fieldtender knelt beside Survivor and let the class settle over the scene.

The class offered no flowcasting healing, and Alistair had never expected that from it. Its value lay in the way it sorted urgency. The skill touched the girl’s condition and arranged the problem into something he could understand. It gave him priorities rather than direct answers: the bleeding leg before the abrasions, the cold and fever before the bruises, and the ankle only after the blood loss was under control. Breathing also registered through the skill, but nothing felt broken in a way that threatened her life immediately.

Few classes from the Hall had earned his gratitude more quickly.

Once he had understood how overbearing Clonemancer truly was, he had made himself a short list of class groups he considered essential. Combat, flowcasting, healing. Utility mattered, and it had already changed his life, but those three were vital for surviving against the Company. Of them all, healing had been the most difficult to chase. The stronger healing paths relied on lifeflow, and Alistair had none of the affinity or long exposure those classes seemed to require. He had failed again and again. In the end, Fieldtender was what he managed to win: not a healer in the full sense, but a class focused on recognizing what would kill someone first and what might keep them alive.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

Now Fieldtender proved its worth. Fieldtender rechecked everything with more care than Survivor had been able to spare. The rough bindings around the girl’s leg were unwound, the wound cleaned as well as the situation allowed, and then rewound more firmly once the skill’s urgent pull eased slightly. The small reduction in pressure inside the class told him he was moving in the right direction.

The absence of water remained a problem until Survivor solved it.

Improvising under that class felt like following a chain of opportunities only he could see. He moved off the roadside, cut into the stem of a thick, pale weed growing near the ditch, and found it full of clear watery sap. The sap was imperfect, but far cleaner than mud or stagnant runoff. He brought the fluid back in torn cloth and used it to rinse the girl’s cuts while Fieldtender watched how the skill responded. When the sting of infection and dirt lessened in the skill’s sense, he knew it was enough.

The fever remained, and he could do little for it immediately beyond covering her and getting her out of the cold.

The ankle was next. Because the skill marked severity rather than treatment, Fieldtender adjusted the wrap again and again while Survivor shaped the support. Survivor used a straight branch smoothed of its worst edges and strips of cloth from torn garments. When the splint was placed wrongly, the class kept the injury high in urgency. When he shifted it into a better angle and tightened the wrap properly, the pressure lessened.

Meanwhile, Shade had reached the tavern. He did not go to the front. The front would have been too difficult this early, when every face near the entrance would still notice a stranger. Instead, he circled to the back.

The rear entrance led into a narrow service room used for bins, cleaning rags, and short-term delivery crates before they were taken farther in. From there, one door connected to a storage passage and another to the main kitchen. Reaching the little back kitchen where Alistair worked still required crossing the main kitchen.

The back door could be opened only from the inside, so Shade flattened himself beside the wall and waited.

He could spare a few minutes. Someone would use it sooner or later. Trash had to go out and deliveries had to come in. Morning in a tavern was always busy for the staff.

He pressed himself deeper into the building’s shadow and let Fade do the rest. If no one noticed him, it would be a perfect entry. If someone did, he was only a hooded loiterer in an alley, which was inconvenient rather than immediately disastrous.