Yellow pustules burst and spill more ichor on the stone. Meg watches, wincing. Elis suffers. I watch, curiously. “These are super infected,” I note. The flesh all around the wound is infected, really, the bacteria boring into it. The ants are incredibly clean, really, but they do not have ways to fully sterilize things.
My work is cut out for me, but it’s a little fun. Could I use my healing spell offensively if I used it on the bacteria? I don’t try.
Instead, I hold my breath, casting it again. The flesh writhes, wriggles, getting eaten away by the poison in the ant’s veins. Hmmm, how troublesome. What will I do about that?
Gently, [Suppression] flickers out. It latches onto the troubles with almost no effort. The ant in front of me is poisoned, sick, and infected. The fact that she’s hung on for so long is a testament to her endurance.
With the suppression in place, I cast another heal, making a little more progress, but that’s just burying infected flesh in new one. I shake my head gingerly. That won’t work. Pulling out the goblin knife, I coat it in mana, cutting away the bits I just healed.
Elis writhes a little, but Meg shushes her, running her antenna over the other ant’s head.
There are a few ways for me to get rid of the infection and the poison. On one hand, I could just cut it out, then regenerate the ant after. But, looking at her decrepit state, I don’t think she’d survive that. The same thing goes for [Deconstruction]. The bacteria are kinda too small to target.
Troublesome, troublesome. I’ll have to adjust my healing spell to drive back the sickness in her.
Mana rushes into me from the core, and I pass it off to the ants again. With the entire colony supporting me, I have more than enough mana for my needs. I pour a bit of it into healing myself, fully closing up my arm and leg. Then I focus on Elis again.
“Get her some food, she’ll need it. This’ll be unpleasant,” I say, and after a chitter from Meg, a few caretakers rush to obey.
Elis looks at me like a dull piece of steel. Unbreaking, even in the face of all this. Strong. I smile, just a hint of one, then cast my “heal”.
It’s a barely recognizable, butchered version of it, even worse than the piece of shit I usually work with, and it will hurt her. I know that much, but I cast it anyway.
The spell crashes into the wound, eating away at the desiccated flesh. It’s barely even healing anymore, spilling tainted ichor as the flesh decays away. Not quite right, I suppose. I reconstruct the pattern in my mind, half-cast it, then [Deconstruct] and analyze it.
Then I cast another, new, improvised and modified piece-of-shit spell.
Some flesh regrows, some of the disease disappears, but the new flesh has a complete lack of blood vessels, and so I cut it back out. I hold the construct for my spell in my mind, [Deconstruct] it, then make a new one. My mana runs low, and I pull more from the full core, passing it back to the colony. Blood trickles down my nose.
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Cast. Fail. Retry.
Cast. Fail. Retry.
Cast. Fail. Retry.
[Flesh Restoration 6 > 7]
Cast. Fa- wait a second. That one did actually disintegrate a bit of the venom. It also melted more of the ant, but well. It happens. But it gives me something to work from.
I analyze the skill again, looking at its intricacies and finding small bits that are causing trouble. I do, however, find one structure responsible for doing a little bit of dissolving the venom. A tiny, hair thin extension outside the main rings of brilliance, almost worm like, ready to eat into existing flesh and… replace it?
Not quite, but it has a disintegration aspect, I’m sure. I cast the spell with more power, and indeed, channels dig into the poison like little worms, eating away and leaving clean flesh behind. Problem one, solved.
After two more cores full of mana, my eyes have started bleeding a little too, and I need to occasionally cast healing on myself. That’s okay, though, it’s working. Finally, the ant is looking a little healthier, and a bunch of the venom is gone.
Now, I just need to find out how to kill the bacteria and dessicated flesh. I work off of the venom-purging bit that is already there, and find that it resonates with the essence I got from picking
I hum, a tiny bit, leaning into that essence. It taught me how to break magic, but given that ants have levels, even if they’re just in the decimals, bacteria does, too. Can I just… shatter their vessels? It would be a sweeping blow that wouldn’t hurt the ant but be mighty unpleasant for the infection.
A modification later, putting all my practice with the mana maze into the working, I cast it.
[Skill Mutation.]
[Flesh Restoration 7 > Biological Restoration 3]
Mana pours out of me in a sudden torrent as the skill manifests, draining my entire vessel dry.
It pulls from my skin, scraping against the limits of what I can do, demanding more as I drain the core. The taste of iron fills my mouth, and it feels like there are claws scraping across my bones. The world rings, the sound of nails on a chalkboard.
And I cast.
A torrent of power spills over the ant, scouring it. The twisted modification rips and tears, shattering all in its wake. It’s ruthlessly brutal, and as it touches Elis, she screams. Her flesh bubbles and boils. I hum a little, spitting blood to the side, and [Selecting] the ongoing spell, tearing it apart with [Deconstruction].
The flesh stops bubbling. It looks… better? Miserable, but better.
My legs give out under me and I fall face first on the stone. “Ah,” I sigh. How troublesome. “Can you refill the core again?” I ask Meg. I don’t see the hive queen respond, but I do feel the cool rock being gently pulled from my hands. Eventually it comes back, full of mana, enough to refill my vessel to about halfway.
I cast another enhanced heal on myself, letting me sit up, then I drag my fingers through my hair, pulling the white strands out of my face. They’re sweaty, and cling to me like spiderwebs. A soft sigh leaves my lips, and I look Elis over. She’s healed some more, with a chunk of the infection purged, but her flesh underneath looks almost burned.
The disjointed bits of the spell and their purpose still sits in my mind. I pull at them, analyzing and learning as I go on. It’s curious, seeing the way they interact. I’m pretty sure I achieved what I set out to do, but the pattern was too crude to properly manage the power. It did a mix of disinfection by boiling, breaking magic, and some more troublesome things.
A thin smile spreads on my lips. “Sorry about that,” I tell the stoic warrior. Then I settled down, kneeling again, tracing the carapace. “Let me give it another shot.”
Even the stalwart warrior shivers a little at my declaration.
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