The Fusionist Book 2 -- Chapter 6

Chapter 6

Larek reached back and yanked the spear out of his butt cheek, before triggering his healing Fusion again. At this rate, my body’s going to be exhausted later. Putting off those concerns until later, he was thankful that his vision quickly came back over the next few seconds, only belatedly realizing that he was still facing toward where the blinding light had come from. Fortunately for him, Nedira seemed to have deactivated the bright Fusion, so he wasn’t blinded again; that would’ve been a pain, as the more he used Healing Surge, the more he would pay for it later.

With his sight back and the wound on his back side all closed up, Larek looked around in stark astonishment. The screaming had stopped for the most part, but every single Bog Goblin in sight was writhing on the ground with their hands in front of their oversized eyes. Dropped spears were lying where they had fallen after the monsters had been blinded, all thoughts of attacking the camp forgotten as the pain and disorientation at the sudden lack of sight affected all of them.

“I’m blind!”

“I can’t see!”

“—did you do?!”

“What—”

Unfortunately, as he had heard earlier, it wasn’t just the Bog Goblins that had been affected, as he heard the exclamations and panicked questions of at least a dozen or more students. Worse than that, Larek thought he heard at least one of the caravan guards loudly complaining about being blind, as well as both Martial graduates.

“Nedira! Heal the guards and I’ll get Crester and Rheina!” Larek shouted loudly, easily overheard over the minor screams, shouts, and complaints of the Goblins and students. Quickly bending down, he slipped the wooden anklet off his leg, bending the wood just enough to slip off his body, as he rushed toward where he saw the bedraggled-looking Martial in her cut-up fighting leathers.

A tear of blood ran from one of her eyes as he approached, and he could tell from their glazed look that she was completely blind. He wasn’t sure if the Body Regeneration Skill would eventually heal her eyes over time, though he assumed it would, but he needed her up and moving as soon as possible.

Rheina was crouched in a defensive stance, her knives held out in front of her and her head twitched left and right as she used her other senses to detect the world around her. While she didn’t appear physically nervous, Larek could sense that she was beginning to lose whatever determination she was holding onto as she made random swipes and stabs towards nothing around her.

“Rheina—” he started to say once he was close enough, which caused her to twitch toward him and threaten him with her weapons. “Whoa! Hold on, I’m here to heal you. Don’t stab me.”

“Who—what?  Don’t come any closer!” she shouted, swinging her knives wildly in his direction.

“Do you want to stay blind? I can leave you that way if you wish—”

“No! Don’t go,” she said as Larek started to walk away. “Please…”

“Not a problem. I just need to hold something, and you’ll be fine. Again, watch where you’re pointing those knives.”

He cautiously walked over a few Goblins jerking around in their blindness as he arrived next to the blinded woman. At any moment, he expected her to jerk toward him and stab him in the chest, but she managed to restrain herself. As soon as he was close enough, he pressed the edge of the wooden anklet up against her hand. “I need you to hold this. Don’t worry, you can keep your other knife out if you want.”

With shaking hands, Rheina slipped the knife in her left hand into a sheath on her hip, the movement so natural that she didn’t need sight in order to do it. Once her hand was free, she brought it back up and he pressed the accessory into the palm of her hand and activated the Healing Surge +3 Fusion on it.

The woman sucked in her breath as the healing energy flowed through her body, and she twitched a few times as the wounds she had suffered obviously healed themselves. It didn’t take more than a few seconds before her eyes began to clear up, and she he saw her sag in relief – up until she looked up at Larek in all of his 7-foot-tall height and stepped back in surprise. “You!”

“Uh, yes, it’s me?”

Looking down at her hand without saying anything else, she saw the wooden anklet she was holding and asked, “What? I thought you were going to use a spell.” The Fusion was still activated, but he wasn’t as worried about her holding it for a little longer as he would be with a Mage.

He shook his head. “No, it’s a Fusion. Anyway, we need to heal your comrade over there, before he hurts himself or someone else,” he replied, pointing toward the armored Martial who seemed to be striking out randomly with his strange weapon at whatever he heard around him. Unfortunately, he was getting rather close to one of the students’ tents, and Larek wasn’t sure if there was a student inside.

“Crester! Stop that! We’re coming to heal you,” Rheina immediately shouted, racing through the collapsed forms all over the ground. The other graduate stopped his frantic attacks at her words and stood there in a defensive posture, his shield out in front of him and his weapon out to the side and ready to hit someone.

“It works best if he is holding it against his skin!” Larek shouted after her, and he saw her nod as she arrived next to the armored Martial. With a quick motion at something she said that Larek couldn’t hear as he navigated his way over, he slipped the shield off his left arm and swung it over his head to attach and rest on something connected to his back, leaving his left hand free. A moment later, he was holding the wooden anklet and Larek saw him twitch once, before his eyes began to heal themselves of their blindness.

“Incredible! Is this like one of those stone squares the instructors were using after the battle against those Scissions a few days ago?”

Larek nearly missed a step at his words, as he remembered the Dean saying something about him getting rid of the remaining Healing Surge Fusions that Larek had created on the stone slabs by giving them to Fort Hilltower. He supposed it made sense that the Martial graduates would know of them, even if they hadn’t used them before.

“Uh, yes, but we don’t have time for that right now. What are you going to do with all of these Goblins?” he asked, taking their attention away from the Fusion on the wooden accessory as he walked up to the pair of Martials and grabbed the anklet from Crester’s hand. “I need this to help heal the other students that were also blinded,” he said, not missing the disappointed look that the armored individual gave him when he took the accessory back.

“Speaking of that, we need to have a talk about what happened… but I guess you’re right, it can wait until later,” Rheina said, looking around. As if it was her first time seeing the Bog Goblins on the ground, she shook her head. “I can’t believe how powerful that light was. Look what it did to them. How—”

“They’re particularly sensitive to light,” came a voice that Larek immediately recognized that was coming from behind Crester. They all turned toward Verne as he carefully made his way around the writhing forms on the ground. “Being blinded like that caused them tremendous damage, not only to their sight but also to their minds. They are essentially helpless now,” he said, while at the same time gently kicking one of the Goblins near him in the leg. The monster barely even responded other than a small twitch in reaction to the kick.

Larek was tempted to warn the boy away from a potentially harmful monster, but then he realized that his roommate was correct. None of the Goblins had gotten up or really done anything of note after being blinded. They were, as he had said, helpless, which made the next act by the caravan guards and the Martials hard to stomach.

With brutal efficiency, they slaughtered the Bog Goblins to the last monster. Larek couldn’t bring himself to participate, so he spent the next half-hour checking in with all of the students and healing them of their blindness along with Nedira, Verne, and Norde (who all had access to the Healing Surge Fusion in one way or another), making sure not to let those they helped hold onto the activated Fusion for more than a few seconds. From what he understood, it was the massive wounds that required nearly a minute of healing during the Scission attack at the Academy which caused the temporary comas, but relatively small healing like this was perfectly fine.

“Nice job with the blinding light, Nedira,” Larek said later when the camp had settled down a little. He doubted many would be getting back to sleep, but for now they seemed to be safe; luckily, even the guards that had fallen during the attack weren’t killed, only severely injured, so they still had a relatively full complement of defenders if such an attack were to happen again that night. He was worried that they might fall into comas as well after such healing, but other than a vast weariness that dragged them down, they seemed to be fine. It probably helped that Larek oversaw their healing and didn’t let the Fusion push them too far.

“Well, when Verne mentioned their light sensitivity, it was almost like an epiphany went off in my mind, and I knew what I had to do,” she replied, nodding toward Larek’s roommate.

“Then good thinking, both of you,” he said to them both, who appeared to sit up a little straighter as they sat around their tents. Larek had to admit that it was good thinking, especially when he considered what he had done – which was essentially put himself in danger without thinking. He hadn’t even done all that much other than temporarily stop the Goblins from advancing on the tents.

When did I get so reckless? I don’t even want to fight monsters.

While he didn’t want to fight monsters, that wasn’t his motivation. Instead, it was the people he was helping to defend; he didn’t necessarily know or particularly care about the other students, other than those that he new personally such as the ones sitting around him right now, but they were also children who couldn’t defend themselves. Also, unlike most of the Kingdom’s population that he had interacted with in one way or another, they seemed to be over (or mostly over) their hatred or fear of him, which made him feel a little more protective of them than he ever considered he would.

Well, all but Rendle, at least.

A little later that night, practically morning, despite his predictions that no one else would be getting any sleep that night, Larek finally got the rest that he was desperately chasing only a few hours before.

When he was woken up in the morning, his body dragged and he felt inordinately tired. I guess it would’ve been better to simply stay up all night.

Regardless of his body’s complaints, he got up with the rest of the caravan as they made ready for the last push toward Garventon.

Book 2 Chapter 7: https://www.patreon.com/posts/fusionist-book-2-81392895