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Chapter 92: Casualties - Markets and Multiverses
🕑 Added 2023-04-28 05:00:08 +0000 UTCAuthor’s Note: Slight correction to previous chapter. I am bad at math. Miria has Grade 9 Agility, not Grade 10. 104+73+20 is 197, which is three points below the cutoff for the grade 10 Agility.
The soldiers took a few hours to deal with the dead and wounded while Sallia and I sat in the corner and talked. Once the more serious injuries and potentially fatal injuries of the soldiers were dealt with, a doctor came by and double checked Sallia’s work. He gave Sallia a few compliments for properly setting my bones and keeping me company, before he wrapped my bones and sternly forbade me from walking or doing strenuous activity for at least three weeks. Then, he checked Sallia’s broken arm and wrapped it up as well.
I winced at the idea of sitting around for three weeks. With my Fortitude at Grade 10, I would likely heal much faster than that. However, while the soldiers seemed to realize that Sallia was rather good at strengthening her body using her attunement, they seemed to think that my abnormal performance during the battle was due to Sallia boosting me during the fight, either with spellcasting or shaping. At least, that was the impression I got from the doctor when he treated me.
Which caused me to chuckle a bit. Sallia could theoretically strengthen other people with her attunement, but she wasn’t very good at it yet. And her spells got notably weaker when she used them on other people, since she hadn’t memorized the sub-symbols to target her enhancement spells on other people yet, either. Sallia seemed horribly embarrassed by the idea that she had been boosting me during the fight, since she knew that I had done everything on my own with the help of my runes.
Luckily, even though she seemed horribly embarrassed, Sallia also seemed to realize it was a good excuse for how abnormally strong our bodies were. In any case, having a strong body was pretty unusual since Orthanoids were usually physically weak, but since Sallia knew body-enhancing spells it wasn’t too hard to explain why we could jump off of a wall without getting injured.
After the doctor left, Felix came over, bearing a handmade stretcher. The ones in the fort were all a little large for me, so Felix had made a smaller one and then adjusted the handholds to make it easier for people to carry me around without accidentally jostling me too much.
I appreciated the effort Felix had gone through to make my time a little more comfortable, even if not walking for an extended period of time was going to suck. Sallia and Felix did their best to take my mind off of being temporarily crippled, joking and telling me random stories I was sure they made up on the spot. Anise joined in as well, once the doctor had made sure she wasn’t hurt during the fight, and the four of us chatted and waited for the adults to finish dealing with the other injured of the fort.
Eventually, Lauren, and Ella came and told us it was time to go. They gave Felix’s stretcher dubious looks, but after testing it, they gave Felix an approving nod, before they picked me up. Meanwhile, the six of us traveled to the entrance of the cavern, where we waited for the other soldiers to join us.
Ella and Lauren spoke in hushed voices, and since my Perception was still terrible, I couldn’t eavesdrop on them. However, I noticed that both of them wore grim expressions, which made me a little nervous.
“What’s wrong?” I asked Ella. “Is there a problem?”
Ella hesitated for a moment, as if wondering whether she should really share this information with children. Then, she sighed, before nodding. “There might be a problem. While there are occasional Orukthyri that slip into the tunnels beneath the earth, they’re pretty rare. For four warriors and a caster show up at once might mean a full warband has managed to get into the underdark somehow. If that’s the case, it would be a huge problem.”
I also frowned once Ella said that. The five Orukthyri we had faced at the border cavern had been incredibly powerful, and had given a fairly large garrison of troops trouble during a fight. We had somewhere between thirty and forty combatants at the border cavern, and several soldiers had died or been injured during a fight with only five enemies. How dangerous would a full warband be?
“How big is an Orukthyri warband?” I asked.
“Anywhere between fifty and five-hundred Orukthyri,” said Lauren, who was also frowning.
I gasped, trying to imagine what a warband of five hundred Orukthyri would look like.
Our city had around twenty thousand residents, and most of those were noncombatants. There were a little over a thousand soldiers who guarded the city, and they were spread out across all of the border caverns of the city and the fort guarding the entrance to the surface.
If five hundred Orukthyri fought with the thousand or so soldiers of the city in an open battle.
It would be a crushing defeat for us. The thousand or so soldiers of the city had no chance of winning against an army of five hundred Orukthyri, even if some of those Orukthyri were children and noncombatants.
Suddenly, I felt very nervous. If a full-size warband had settled inside of one of the ruined cities beneath the earth, unless we got help from some of our neighboring cities, this might be the end of the city. And while the cities traded with each other, I didn’t know if they would be willing to lend us aid if worst came to worst. This wasn’t the islands, where the village chiefs all had mental runes enhancing their intelligence and every village had a few cousins on an island they saw every so often. The cities of this world were fairly isolated from each other.
I very much hoped that Ella was wrong about an Orukthyri warband being present in the caves. Or, if she was correct, that the Orukthyri warband was on the smaller side. A warband of 50 didn’t seem like it was impossible for the city to manage, as long as terrain was carefully prepared beforehand.
Then, I frowned.
Could terrain be prepared underground?
For the tunnels that weren’t reinforced with magic items, it didn’t seem too hard to just collapse the tunnels on the Orukthyri. Terrifying as the creatures may be, they weren’t terribly bright, and luring them into a tunnel and then collapsing it on top of them would probably kill them.
However, the main tunnels that led from one place to another were heavily reinforced with shaping-related magic items. Even if we tried to collapse a main tunnel on top of them, we would probably fail. But if we lured them into a side cavern and then dropped the ceiling on them, perhaps we could emerge from this crisis relatively unscathed.
A lot of it came down to where the Orukthyri warband was located. If they had taken over an abandoned city, luring them into a side cavern and collapsing it would be very difficult. But if they were located in a small cavern that wasn’t magically reinforced…
While I was lost in my thoughts, the other soldiers arrived, and a group of thirteen started traveling back towards the city. As we were walking, Ella looked at me lying on the stretcher again, and then winced.
“God. Miria’s mother is going to skin me alive,” she said, wincing.
Lauren looked at me, and his eyes widened in realization, before he chuckled. “At least nobody died. It doesn’t look like she’ll take more than a week or two to recover. Three at most. You’ll survive getting chewed out by a civilian.”
“Doesn’t mean it’ll be pleasant, though,” said Ella with a grimace. “Even if I have a higher status than her, since her daughter got injured under my watch, I can’t really say anything back.” Ella made an even more unpleasant face. “Besides, it’s not like I can’t sympathize with her at all. I just think that she’s too overprotective and she should let Miria make her own decisions. but at the end of the day, Miria was still injured under my protection this time.”
“Teacher, I made my own decisions during the fight. Five variant Orukthyri coming to attack the border cavern was impossible to predict in advance, so you don’t have to feel guilty about it. I simply did what I thought was best to keep the other soldiers and myself alive long-term,” I said.
Ella frowned, but nodded. “I suppose, Miria. But the fact remains that right now you’re only twenty years old. Until you turn at least thirty five or forty years old, your parents and I are responsible for keeping you safe. And even if I couldn’t have predicted the Orukthyri raid, or the fact that you would be injured, the fact remains that you were badly hurt under my protection. At the end of the day, nothing I say will change that fact.”
The six of us fell into silence after Ella’s statement, and the group of soldiers didn’t seem too interested in speaking much either. After all, while several soldiers had only been injured by the Orukthyri, several soldiers had also died during the fight. Thus, the entire procession walked on in solemn silence until we reached the city.
When we returned home, the soldiers and spellcasters who were officially part of the army went to report what had happened to the overseer, request reinforcements for the border cavern, and make future arrangements.
Since Lauren, Ella, and the four of us weren’t part of the army, the six of us made our way to Ella’s house. Felix, Anise and Sallia were still tagging along behind me, and Lauren was still helping carry me. We reached Ella’s house, before she hesitated in front of the door.
Ella gave me a couple glances out of the corner of her eye, before she sighed. “All right, let’s get this over with” Her face looked a little frustrated, but after gritting her teeth, she still gently hoisted me up again. “Let’s go see Miria’s family and let them know what happened.”
* * *
My mother, predictably, was quite unhappy. I had three limbs broken during my first proper encounter with denizens of the deep. However, although my mother was frustratingly protective, she wasn’t as enraged as I had worried she would be. When Ella and I discussed my role in the entire encounter, especially the fact that the entire situation had been unusual and I had actively placed myself in danger, she was more forgiving of the fact that my first proper combat outing caused me to return in a stretcher with three broken limbs.
However, she did give me the stink eye from the corner of her eyes several times. I had the distinct feeling that she was going to still going to chew me out for putting myself in harm’s way. However, my mother seemed to acknowledge that circumstances really had spiraled out of everyone’s control, and at that my actions had potentially saved the lives of several soldiers. At the very least, the fact that I had saved a few lives during the fight and hadn’t gotten hurt for no reason seemed to mollify her a little.
After that, Ella offered to let me take a couple days off while I recuperated. I declined, since I didn’t want to waste any training time. Even if I felt the odds of the city getting overrun by the Orukthyri were low, I wanted to be kept in the loop just in case. I wasn’t sure if I could make some sort of crucial last-minute contribution to a potential fight with the Orukthyri, but I wanted to be kept in the loop so that I could keep an eye out for opportunities, or signs of impending catastrophe.
Other cities in the dark had fallen before, and while I hoped this city wouldn’t collapse as a result of an Orukthyri warband, my hopes had no ability to alter reality. I needed to seize every second I could to train and improve my abilities, just in case everything went horribly wrong soon. Thus, I opted to keep training with Ella, although I abandoned my swordsmanship practice until I could walk again.
Ella spent the next few days delicately tiptoeing around any physical activity that required me to move around. Sallia and Felix came to visit me every day, and Sallia would secretly heal my muscles and flesh using her healing rune ability every time she saw me and we could get a few minutes of privacy. Since Felix knew that Sallia wanted to heal me, he often helped distract the adults so that they didn’t notice how… unusual Sallia’s healing method was.
I also asked Ella about using my general shaping to try to alter my bones into being intact, but she quickly stopped me from following that idea through.
Apparently, unless one had very good knowledge of how bones, muscles, etc. worked, trying to shape people’s bodies into being healthy usually broke stuff inside of people, killing or crippling them afterwards.
Luckily, the healing spell created by my attunement was perfectly fine to use, even if it was a huge essence hog and needed a lot of fine-tuning. Even though it wasn’t a terribly efficient spell yet, I used it whenever I could to enhance my healing speed. Coupled with my Grade 10 Fortitude, it only took me two days for my bones to be somewhat intact again, although they still felt a little delicate. However, I was guessing that within another day or two, I would be fully healed. The doctor had mentioned I would need three weeks to fully heal, but after two days I was already mostly finished healing.
I couldn’t help but feel that magic healing was truly miraculous.
In the meantime, the city’s first scouting parties returned from investigating the potential Orukthyri warband.
I didn’t think much of this at first, and simply waited for Ella to give me information about what the scouts had found. However, my indifference changed when I heard that Jonathan, my oldest brother, had volunteered to be one of the scouts. He had returned alive, but he was injured.
Comments
Nathan Sto
Perhaps Miria should focus on the madness portion of her ability more, if they're fighting large numbers of enemies that aren't resistant to it. Ideally, she'd be able to drive them insane enough to attack each other.
The Lost Pages
Thanks for another great chapter.
MinE
Looks like the teams high physical stats are going to be a minor problem; luckily Miria can just explain it as a product of her own shaping after they realize Salia isn’t buffing her. Felixes lack of runes is actual helping him since his physical stats will be slightly above average at bes.
IDFree
"my hope had no ability to alter reality" Yet
Arkeus
Mmmh, Miria is under estimating the outlier caster and shapers of the place. If the overseer is able to cast tier 8 spells....
Stephen Pearson
Thanks for the chapter! :-)
