Chapter 19 – The Calm after the Storm

Jake stepped off the skull and sat down in the dirt.

His broken arm hung wrong at his side. His ribs ground together every time he breathed. His ankle was holding, barely, the ligaments he’d forced tight with Tension already starting to slacken as his concentration slipped.

He looked at the Pendant of Might notification and dismissed it. Later.

Around him, nobody spoke. Lyle was face down on the grass. Glenn had his hands on his knees, staring at the chieftain like he expected it to get back up. Susan was sitting against a tree with her eyes closed and blood soaking through the wrap on her shoulder, chest rising and falling in a way that told him she was alive but not much else. Chloe looked like she’d seen a ghost.

Sloane was the first to move. She got herself upright with her good arm and stood there swaying for a moment before she found her footing.

“Edwin,” Jake said.

“I’m here.” His voice came from the tree line, rough and low. He walked out holding his ribs, one side of his face dark with blood that had dried into the lines around his eye. He scanned the clearing the way he always did. Old habit. Jake doubted he could switch it off if he tried.

The portal opened without ceremony. A rectangle of white light split the air at the edge of the clearing, the familiar smell of stale carpet and fluorescent buzz leaking through it like they’d never left.

The apartments.

Nobody moved toward it.

Jake started with Sloane.

She didn’t complain when he crossed over to her, which told him the arm was bad. Sloane always complained. He looked at the break without touching it, only to notice it wasn’t broken at all, only dislocated.

“Don’t,” she said, when he reached for it.

“I’m not going to touch it.”

“You were about to,” she said. “Worry about yourself first. Your blood is dripping on me.”

Jake blinked and drew in a sharp breath as he refocused on himself.

Oh yeah.

He felt sick to his stomach, the pain a throbbing nightmare all the way through him.

He pressed Minor Heal against his own forearm, right above the fracture, and pushed the mana as deep as he could manage. He targeted the tissue surrounding the break rather than the bone itself, using the energy to clamp the muscles tight like an internal splint. The best he could do was take the swelling down and stop the hairline cracks from spreading.

“How is it?” She asked

“Still broken,” he replied, seething in pain. It was so bad he was trembling now. Pain Resistance was ticking up in Mastery. “So, terrible.” He looked down at it. “Will I be able to use it again, do you think?”

“How the hell would I know? I’m not a doctor.”

He moved to Edwin next. The cut above his eye had bled a lot, the way head wounds did, but it was shallow. Jake healed it in one pass and Edwin sat completely still throughout, watching the tree line.

“Edwin.”

“Mm.”

“It’s done.”

A long pause. “I know.” His voice was flat in a way that had nothing to do with calm. “I counted six of us going in. I should have planned for something that size. I didn’t.” He said it the way someone reads from a report. “Won’t happen again.”

“I think it jumped up in difficulty for the last monster.”

Edwin only nodded, his attention glued to the treeline.

Jake left him to it.

Lyle had rolled onto his back at some point. He was awake, staring straight up at the canopy with both arms flat at his sides. Jake crouched beside him and looked him over. Bruised ribs, a shallow cut across his shoulder, whatever the chieftain had done to his legs when it stood over him. Jake healed the shoulder and stood.

“Thanks,” Lyle said, still staring at the sky.

“Can you walk?”

“Yeah.” He didn’t move. Then, quietly, “I went down.”

“You did.”

“I’m supposed to—” He stopped. Started again. “I had one job.”

“You did well”

Lyle was quiet for a moment. “Did I?”

Jake paused. “Not really.”

Lyle nodded once at the canopy and finally sat up, moving like every part of him hurt, which it probably did.

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Jake went to Susan next. She opened her eyes when his shadow crossed her.

The shoulder wrap had soaked through completely. He peeled it back and looked. The original wound from the sentry had torn open again during the fight, deeper now, and she’d reopened the gash across her chest somewhere in the middle of it all without apparently noticing. He used two heals on her once he had enough mana, pushing both as deep as the skill would go, and watched the worst of it close over.

She looked down at his work, then back up at him.

“Jerry would have hated all of this,” she said. “He couldn’t even watch horror films. Would leave the room with an excuse that he was getting more popcorn. Always took him until after the scary scene was over for him to return.” A short sound came out of her that might have been a laugh.

Jake said nothing.

“He wasn’t weak, Jake,” she said. “If he was here, he’d put us all to shame. That was Jerry. It was meant to be him here, not me.”

Jake shifted his weight, keeping his silence, he shifted uncomfortably and moved onto the next person.

Give me more Mastery.

Glenn was sitting against a rock with Jonathan’s bow across his lap, picking dried blood from the grip with his thumbnail. He’d taken a deep cut across the cheek at some point that was still leaking, a thin red line running jaw to cheekbone.

Jake reached for it.

Glenn turned his head away sharply. “Don’t.”

“It needs closing.”