Chapter 91 I’ve Got You.

  Before anyone could react to Isaac’s comment about demigods meditating, his eyes snapped towards Lenna. His Polarity Sense was working again, mostly, and he could feel Lenna slipping. He acted entirely on instinct and shadow-stepped next to her. He made it in an instant but then immediately collapsed to the ground next to her with one hand on his heart and the other reaching for Lenna. He may have felt better but he was still in no condition to be teleporting around. He wasn’t actually as good as he felt. His core felt like it was about to burst apart from what he had just made it do.

  “Isaac.” Lenna whispered.

  “Start meditating.” He told her through gritted teeth.

  Lenna’s breathing was ragged and her voice was mostly just air. “Are you okay?” She asked him while her own mana pathways were being cannibalized by her core as it demanded mana to be bled out through its gaping wound.

  Isaac tried to force the pain away from his face as he looked into his wife’s eyes. “I’m fine.” He assured her. “But I did not come back from the dead, again, just to lose you now. Meditate. I’ve got you.” He sat his hand on her forehead. “Just focus on not leaving me.” There was still a hint of pained tension in his voice and face but Lenna got the message.

  Lenna closed her eyes and tried to steady her breathing. She forced everything out of her mind except for the feeling of Isaac’s hand on her forehead. She felt some of his power start to wash down through her. It wasn’t a lot, which made it easier for her to let it exist in the background of her mind. It didn’t take long for her breathing to even out again and for her mana intake to gradually ramp up to a higher rate than what she was losing.

  Isaac was suffering. His core screamed at him that he was overtaxing it, as he steadily sent a gentle stream of death flames into Lenna’s body radiating down through her from her forehead. Isaac felt like he was actively undoing all of the healing that his most recent meditation session had given him. He was slowly but steadily reaching a point where he was going to be worse off than when he had woken up after his resurrection.

  “I’ve got you.” The healer said from behind Isaac.

  Isaac felt a strange but soothing feeling settle over him. He wasn’t actually being healed but the healer was soothing the pain bursting forth from his chest. He took the help where he could and just focused on keeping Lenna together until he felt her finally stop degrading. It took another minute before she was completely healed again and still meditating. Isaac slowly lowered how much death flames he was feeding Lenna until he was no longer giving her any at all. Isaac sighed and removed his hand from her head. “She’s stabilized again.” Isaac told the healer whose hands were still softly glowing a pure radiant white.

  “Good, now, laydown, take off your ring, and let me put you to sleep.” The healer told him in a tone that brokered no argument.

  “What?” Isaac asked. “But we-”

  “Shut up and do what I tell you before you start breaking down from the inside.” The healer snapped at him.

  Isaac was so taken aback at being ordered around like that that he did as he was told with only slight hesitation. He laid down on his back and took off his ring so the healer’s mental magic could affect him.

  “What level are you?” The healer asked and his hands stopped glowing.

  Pain rocked Isaac to the core as all of a sudden all of the pain suppression from the healer’s spell was removed. “Fourteen.” Isaac whispered through gritted teeth. He didn’t want Lenna’s meditation to break because of him so he was trying as hard as he could to not sound how he felt.

  The healer nodded. “Rest well sweet child, have dreams so mild.” He chanted and closed both of Isaac’s eyes. Isaac didn’t even have time to react before he was entirely unconscious in a sleep so deep that he didn’t even have the ability to have mild dreams.

  —

  Isaac awoke to the sounds of muffled whispers and boots on a hollow wooden floor. No sooner had consciousness began to take hold of him once again, did a wave of pain make itself known. Before he even had time to react to the pain, some long forgotten habit kept him as quiet as a mouse. He didn’t even suck in a breath in pain but instead stayed entirely silent. He stopped breathing and didn’t let a single part of himself move as he slowly worked to get a handle on the pain. ‘All pain can be lived with.’ Went through his mind. It was a mantra that came from an unknown place. It was meant to help him through even the most agonizing of events. It was also very much not true. There could always be a pain greater than even the most extreme stoicism, but Isaac didn’t think about that. Instead, his mantra cycled in his head until he finally reached a point where he could breathe without giving away that he was awake.

  “How’re you feeling?” The healer’s voice came from right next to him.

  Isaac let his eyes flutter open naturally and regarded the moss colored eyes that hung above him. “Like-” Isaac began but then stopped as even just a single word threatened to send him into a spasm. With the knowledge that the pain was about to come, Isaac braced himself and continued: “claws, around, heart. Acid, in, veins.” He explained and then closed his eyes. The dim light in the warehouse was too much for him in the state that he was in.

  “Anyone else would be dead, probably.” The healer told him. “It isn’t that your soul has any stronger integrity than anyone else's, certainly not mine as a cleric, but rather that there is just so much more of it that the damage is extremely spread out.” Isaac heard the healer sit down next to him. “If everyone’s soul is a blanket, cleric souls are like a canvas tarp. Our souls are continuously reinforced as we level to help us have more Soul Integrity to burn for miracles. Everyone else has a wool blanket whose thickness is equivalent to their level plus one. The exact unit of measure doesn’t matter. Most people’s souls are just a blanket that is big enough to cover them. For you, yours is like a massive blanket that was folded up until it was the appropriate size. That is why you can take in and hold so much mana. The gaps between the layers let new mana enter easily and there is plenty of space for it to hang around. Are you following so far?”

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  Isaac let his eyes open again so he could look at the healer. The healer met his eyes and Isaac nodded almost imperceptibly.

  “Good.” The healer replied. “Now, for your wife, her blanket is full of burn holes. It doesn’t hold mana as well as it used to, she is bleeding it out almost as quickly as it enters. This is a dangerous position to be in, but it is definitely not an unrecoverable one. You have three times as many holes but five times the surface area to work with. At the beginning, you were both at about the same level of damage, which was why you were able to move around with only mild difficulty.”

  Isaac scowled at him for suggesting that his previous pain level was only mild. The healer may or may not have been right, but Isaac’s pain tolerance was decently high, he felt like he deserved at least a little more credit.

  “After the incident, when your meditation woke her up, or at the very least pulled her out of meditation, and you brought her back from the brink. Well, let’s just say that you overdid it a bit.” The healer went on. “Something else to keep in mind is that you both will heal at about the same rate while you are asleep, but you will heal a lot more than she will while meditating. The issue now is the fact that you cannot meditate without putting her at risk.”

  Isaac slightly raised an eyebrow as if to ask the healer what they were supposed to do next.

  The healer sighed. “Well, the best thing to do would be to move you to somewhere else. We can’t risk waking her up by moving her but you are already awake, and somehow still alive despite leaking enough mana to give me the chills. If we take you far enough away, you should be able to meditate without waking her up. The issue with that is that we have no idea how far away we would have to move you.” He explained to the still silently watching and listening Isaac.

  “No.” Isaac spoke.

  “Well we can’t move her.” The healer countered what he thought that Isaac was saying.

  “Neither.” Isaac corrected him.

  “So you are going to just sit there and suffer until she can be awake and not bleed out? At that point you can then start meditating whenever she is already awake.” The healer questioned him for clarification and to specifically point out the suffering and waiting parts.

  Isaac nodded slightly.

  The healer sighed again. “Fine. But only because it shouldn’t be more than a day or two until she has healed enough.” He told Isaac. It was clear that he wanted to go with the option that he had given Isaac, but he wasn’t going to try and push, not with two people so close to the brink.

  “Two?” Isaac asked.

  “Mana leakage is the result of Soul Integrity Degradation, not exactly a direct expression at all levels. Anyway, what I am trying to say is that it isn’t quite exponential but it is close. That’s why even though you aren’t even twice as injured as you were, you are still gushing mana like a severed artery.” The healer explained. “Healing completely will take quite a while, for both of you, but getting to a point where you can both at least relieve and feed yourselves shouldn’t take longer than three days.”

  Isaac couldn’t even groan. He hadn’t thought about how his meditation would mess with Lenna’s rest and had made their bad situation worse, again. All he could do was be patient and wait. He gave the healer a nod and closed his eyes to rest.

  “Try to sleep if you can.” The healer told him. “If you can sleep away the next two days, that would be for the best.”

  Isaac didn’t bother putting forth the effort to respond. He knew that the healer knew that he had heard him. Isaac felt horrible but he knew that he wouldn’t be able to fall back to sleep after the conversation that they had just had. Instead, he took the forced rest as time to think. He ran through everything that had happened in his head. Every mistake, every coincidence, every lapse in judgment, every perfectly planned and laid out trap. He and Lenna had been going through life consequence free. Nothing that had happened to them recently had really cost them anything. A little pain here and there was easily forgotten. This was different. This time their own souls were torturing them, to death if they weren’t careful.

  His mind slowly pieced together the trap that had taken him out. It was a pressure plate but it was also the entire section of floor that the teleportation circle was on. That meant that there must’ve been some way to prevent the trap from activating or else the duo that they were chasing wouldn’t have been able to escape using it. It was also incredibly sensitive, like one to two pounds of pressure was enough to set it off levels of sensitivity.

  It was definitely a non-magical trap as Isaac hadn’t felt any mana before the entire floor exploded. He figured that there must’ve been some kind of mechanical system that could set off an entire barrel of blasting jelly in an instant. From what he knew, there were two ways to set off blasting jelly. The first was a hard impact, and the second was lightning or electricity. Blasting jelly, unbeknownst to everyone that used it, was closely linked to yellow mana.

  Generating electricity at the current technology level, from what Isaac had seen so far, was incredibly unlikely but not impossible. A magnet through a tube of copper wire was actually how miners set off blasting jelly from a safe distance. They had a small machine that held everything together for them so it wouldn’t go off prematurely. The thing with that machine was that it was usually bolted down on a cart and copper wire was expensive.

  Now, if the trap had used some kind of tension system similar to a crossbow, and pressure on the platform caused the crossbow-like system to fire, then enough force would be able to be made to set off the blasting jelly. The thing was, Isaac hadn’t heard anything snap before the explosion. There might’ve been a click but that was it. Ugh. He wanted to shake his head to clear it, so he could switch topics, but that was a bit much to ask of his body at the moment. Instead, he just settled on mentally brute forcing a change in focus. He continued on like that from one topic to another until nightfall. He had no idea how long he had slept but it must’ve been for a while. By the time that the moon had come up, the fire had died out and the weather had warmed up enough that it was no longer needed.

  “Still awake?” The healer questioned and sat down next to him again.

  Isaac opened his eyes and nodded slightly. He then felt like someone was watching him. He really wished that he still had his ring on but the effort required to put it back on was a bit too much at the moment.

  “Everyone else left until morning. A messenger from the Guild Master showed up with a letter.” He informed Isaac and held out a folded piece of paper. “A messenger from the Magistrate also stopped by but that message was easy enough to relay so I have that for you too whenever you want it. Also the mes-” The healer’s voice cut off as there was a whisper of a ripple of mana right next to him.

  In a blink, a familiar wizard appeared with a scowl on her face so deep that Isaac wasn’t sure if she was going to end him on sight or track down and murder whoever had led to his and Lenna’s current circumstance. “Shhh.” Isaac whispered to her.

  Jala bent down next to him. “I am aware.” She snapped in a whisper. “Now, explain everything to me. From the time we separated until now.”

  Isaac wilted. He didn’t really want to go over everything with her in the first place, but he definitely wasn’t going to suffer through trying to speak it all out lo-

  Jala traced a spell sigil directly on his forehead in rapid but precise strokes. A moment later, Isaac felt a foreign magic settle into his mind and he was suddenly very much aware of his own brain. Jala nodded to herself. “There, anything you think, I will hear. Now speak.”

  Isaac swallowed involuntarily, it hurt. ‘Yes ma’am.’ He replied and began.

  The healer looked like he wanted to protest, but instead, all he could do was sit down between Isaac and Lenna and keep an eye on both of them. Once the crazy dark elven wizard was done, he would finish his conversation with Isaac. Who knew, maybe they would get lucky and she would have a way to help the duo recover, or maybe she would track down and bring in the Guard Captain and his mistress for them. As long as she was helpful, the healer wasn’t about to complain.