Chapter 473: The battle of Heping Gu I

My mind split into five practiced parts, and I was thankful to Katerina for ‘forcing’ the centuries to keep battling each other while I was around. I wasn’t fumbling in the dark, I wasn’t trying to find an optimal configuration.

There were still plenty of unknowns though. The centuries hadn’t really been trying to kill each other, not when they knew a strong healer was in play. There was a level of lethality they’d avoided that I’d need to get used to.

I glanced up at the sky as Fenrir dove, trying to judge the cloud cover. Dark clouds were on the horizon, promising a ferocious storm later, and the sun was scooting over in that direction. More concerning was the amount of smoke and haze coming from the battle. Fires burned, Ash was thrown around as freely as Sand, stampeding horses kicked up clouds of dust, and that was just the beginning!

I don’t think I’d ever asked myself before ‘how much shadow is too much’ for [Wheel of Sun and Moon]. My worst case scenarios had involved thin beams of moonlight or sunlight in otherwise dark caves, or thick clouds of Ash already blocking out the sun. Hadn’t asked ‘when is there so much smoke that my skill stops working’ before.

If I could still see people, was that enough? Indistinct shapes?

On the other side of the smog, was seeing the outline of the sun or moon enough? How much was too much?

Most importantly though:

Would I notice in time that [Wheel of Sun and Moon] was no longer working? Something to be vigilant about.

“Going invisible. Love you.” I told Iona, starting to draw the rune in the air as Fenrir dove. I was going to try and be subtle with my Spatial magic in the Han. Plausible deniability was the name of the game, and if I only ever showed two elements, it was hard to say I was over 256. Wizardry and the ability to lethally defend myself won over the raw utility of Spatial magic, and I could always cheat a little. I could always throw up a ton of fake runes and use them to ‘cast’ one of my other skills. They had to be fake and not real, because otherwise a hostile wizard could properly identify what I was doing and know something was off. By using ‘made up’ runes I could always claim a heritage with a new or unknown [Runesmith].

If I used the real runes with a current language? The only point to doing that was letting people know exactly what I could do, and blowing an order of magnitude more mana to get the same effect.

Although - ugh. It was entirely possible, almost probably, that people would see my wizardry, and via sheer idiocy, come to the right conclusion.

“Hey! I see someone using Radiance, Celestial, and Mirage! They must be a triple classer!” No matter how obvious my wizardry was, no matter how in-their-face I did it, some people were just idiots. Being generous, some people were simply poorly educated and didn’t know wizardry could do that sort of thing… but even then.

Hopefully anyone using bad logic to come to the right conclusion would get bonked by their teammates or utterly ignored.

With the utter absurdity of magic, the runic mandala I was tracing in front of me stayed stationary relative to me, streaks of light tracing through the air as Fenrir dove. Naturally, if I tried to walk and trace the rune at the same time, it wouldn’t work, but being carried did.

Magic made no sense at times. All I could really do was roll with it.

I finished tracing out the rune, fading to invisibility just before Fenrir landed on the cliffside. I hopped off and rushed to the edge of the battle, all seven of my senses assaulted by the carnage. Just one part of me was observing the battlefield, the first time I’d seen people on this scale trying to kill each other outside of a Mirage. It let me gawk at the sheer scope of things without neglecting my healing. It was both more and less chaotic than I’d imagined.

First was the amount of people. There were so many people, I struggled to properly wrap my mind around it. I thought a full Legion was overkill, that we’d be complete overkill.

No.

The 4,000-some fighting members of the Sixth would maybe be a single wing of the army. A small wing.

The battle was in a half-valley, neither side committing troops to taking the high ground Iona and I had just landed on. There had to be a reason why, and it was making me nervous to be in a potentially trapped area without knowing the threat or why two armies had mutually decided to ignore the advantageous ground. The Tears of Vulcan rumbled in the distance, the view unobstructed by soft rolling fields of trampled paddies and burned farms, volcanoes erupting spectacularly.

Most of the people were dullahans, clad in a wide variety of metals. A smattering of non-dullahans were scattered here and there, usually clumped together. A coven of thirteen Osmopodeia [Witches] were flying with broomsticks over one of the armies, occasionally dive-bombing the other side and unleashing a flurry of potions, while powerful shields deflected flurries of crossbow bolts.

Dullahans, by their very nature, came fully armored. With that said, they could change and upgrade their armored skin throughout their lives, as well as put on actual armor on top of it. There were diminishing returns, of course, but between the [Laborer - 213] in a single layer of armor and a simple spear, and the [Warrior - 319] with two sets of armor and intricate weapons on her back, it was clear who was a professional soldier, and who’d grabbed a spear and signed up to ‘defend’ their land.

I could make out the two sides, mostly based on the direction they were facing, and the fighting between the two lines. Parts of the line were fierce, on fire. People were just pummeling each other, going hard, doing their best to kill each other. Clumps of battle. Other places were calmer, the two lines jostling for position and lightly poking at each other, but neither side committing. Cavalry - usually on horses, not always - carved through the sides, powerful warriors trampling on infantry while better-equipped troops attempted to maneuver into position to trap and kill the rampaging troops. Each member of the cavalry had a pennant attached to their spears, clearly marking their allegiances. Banners of red, gold, blue, green, grey, and a dozen more snapped in the breeze, moving up and down as the soldiers fought and repositioned themselves. Their helmets were plumed, their horses vicious, and they all looked a little larger than normal.

Two of the sets - one on each side - was headed by a soldier that was unnaturally large, and there had to be skill or a biomancer involved. My bet was on skill.

A megatherium looked to be the center of the battle, slowly carving through the soldiers. I made a snap decision not to include the beast in my healing. I had to draw a line somewhere, I had to put lives on scales and judge who would live, and who would die. Beasts and other less intelligent animals already didn’t weigh heavily on my scales, and a single gigantic sloth, eating attacks from every direction would take the same amount of mana, the same amount of healing, as dozens and dozens of elvenoids. It wasn’t particularly close, and when it died, it’d stop massacring so many others.

The judgment picked at my morality, it bled my soul, but it was right.

There were three different types of archers I could pick out.

The first was easy. A bow too big to be a shortbow, and far too short to be a longbow, a quiver of arrows, and a commander shouting volleys.

One set worked in pairs, with the crossbowman on their backs, legs up in the air, bracing and aiming a massive crossbow with their feet. A second soldier, generally young, low-level, or entirely lacking a combat tag, was next to them, helping them crank the bow back and reload it as fast as they could. A solid way to multiply the force of stronger troops. They were in neat rows, but I imagined if the cavalry ever got to them it’d be devastating with how immobile they were.

The last I hesitated to call ‘archers’. Four men hoisted an enormous construct on their shoulders, like a small ballista. Instead of the typical ballista bolt I associated with Exterreri and Remus, each one fired dozens of thin, arm-length bolts, controlled by a fifth soldier.

Skills were involved in ammo generation, and all types of arrows were ripping across the field with minimal concern for friend or foe. If hostile cavalry were tearing through part of the battlefield, soldiers on that side were happy to rain arrows into that location, not caring if they hit their own troops to have a chance at hitting the high powered Classers on the opposing side.

That was before the mages. Artillery magic hadn’t come close to falling out of vogue in the intervening centuries. It was just so effective.

The gruesome difference was the dullahans had a strong tendency towards Metal mages over Earth mages.

Runners were hustling between the field medics and the Metal artillery mages, dragging bodies behind them. [Butchers] or some class like that were hacking the bodies apart, stripping off the metallic skin, and handing it over to the [Mages], who promptly fired the body parts across the field.

Other people were scampering all over, trying to collect spent ammo and arrows, and bringing them back to the mages to reforge and refire.

Shockwaves rippled across the battlefield, and Mirages flickered in and out of existence. Screams and yells were shouted from all over, some of them amplified by Sound elements.

Cries about the ‘impurity of metals’ and ‘they’re coming for your children’ on the Yan side - easy to pick out who was who when they kept shouting each other’s name - while the Chu were all about ‘the ultimate execution’.

I felt myself sorely tested in the moment. A strong part of me wanted to say “fuck them, fuck this, you’re all terrible people” and walk away.

But I had sworn otherwise. I had sworn to never see a patient as anything other than another creature in pain. I had sworn to not discriminate who I heal based on class, sex, race, what gods they pray to, nor by any other means. No matter how vile their beliefs, no matter their goals, I had an [Oath] to uphold. The propaganda spewed by the leadership didn’t necessarily reflect the beliefs of the common soldier.

It did raise an interesting question.

Was there a line too far? Was there a stated belief system, a goal or purpose that someone was working towards that would be too much for me? If Thraximundar, the famed scourge of the past, laid dying in front of me, claiming that if I saved him he’d work on enslaving the entire world, should I heal him? Would that make me complicit in his later actions?

The raw text of my [Oath] said I had to help him, barring no patients of mine immediately present that I had to defend.

I had to wonder, for myself, what culpability did I take on for my actions? Did anything reflect on me, or was my calling to heal, to mend, to repair and restore greater than any potential actions down the line?

My take in the moment was down the line, and that did jive neatly with the rest of my [Oath]. If someone was actively trying to cut down fleeing refugees, then the refugees were my patients and I could defend them. Similar logic with torture.

It wasn’t the most satisfying of answers, but the other direction was worse. ‘You believe in this thing, therefore, you are sub-elvenoid and unworthy of life’. Heck, simply phrasing it like that made it clear that I’d be just as bad as the people calling for extermination!

Then where would I draw the line? What list of crimes or beliefs could I make to judge if someone would get healing even if I was capable?

No; in a way, the childish, naive kid I’d been at 8 got it right. Heal everyone, regardless of their beliefs, no matter how vile they may be. After the fact, I could discuss trying to turn people into the proper authorities, those charged with keeping the peace and prosecuting crime.

At times, that was also me, if I believed the cause to be properly just. “You’re alive. You’re also under arrest.” was perfectly valid.

My senses were too good. I could hear them all. Every beg, every plea, every cry for mercy reached me.

I felt like it was some sort of betrayal to ignore them. To dismiss their final cries for aid. I would be a record. I would know them, no matter how little, and I would remember. They would not be forgotten, not ground into the dust of history to never be recalled again.

Creating a full wall for each of them was perhaps too much effort, and yet, was creating a gravestone for the dead really that large of a burden? Didn’t their names, their lives, deserve at least a few characters on a wall somewhere, even if it was as simple as ‘the third soldier I saw die by acid in the lungs and eyes’?

“Mom! MOM! Mom, it’s so cold, please…” One voice slowly got weaker and weaker as it trailed off, the soldier too far from my reach to heal.

“No! Don’t leave me! Don’t lea-” A woman, trailing her entrails out from her waist, was trying to crawl back to her side and where the medics could reach her when her skull was caved in by a horse, the sharp snap of breaking metal the last sound I heard from her.

Another man - barely out of childhood - was trying to scream. Powerful flames had washed over him, melting his face and causing his eyes, mouth, nose, and ears to become filled with molten, hardening metal.

A hundred screams, a thousand atrocities, and that was only the start of the skills being thrown around. Clouds of yellow Acid roiled across the field, stripping metal off of people’s skin, and I knew all too well what it was doing to delicate throats and lungs, sinuses and mouths. People coughed and hacked in the wake of the Acid, spitting melted parts of their body out that were needed on the inside. A soldier had a brave lunge with a beautiful decapitating strike, only for the dullahan’s severed head to laugh as his body kept going. He picked up his head, stuck it back on his shoulders, and stabbed the soldier twice more to make sure he was dead.

A spark came behind the Acid cloud, an eruption of flames just another big moment on the battlefield. One soldier had a blender of blades swirling around her, moving in fine concert as she slew anyone who came close, grabbing their weapon and adding it to her maelstrom. It only lasted a moment or two until one of her swords betrayed her, a focused skill overcoming her wide skill, having it plunge into her back and out through her chest. One soldier, clearly one of the raw recruits without even the [Warrior] tag, was being safe and conservative, blowing huge gouts of Sand into the eyes and joints of anyone who came close before he and his squad descended upon them, then leapt back and waited for someone else to pick a fight with them.

A [Spellsword] was breathing cones of Lava at people before stabbing them with a spear. Some soldiers were furiously fanning a small fire in the middle of the battlefield, and the smoke was going against the wind. Their side stayed well clear of the smoke, and anyone on the opposing side that got too deep of a breath had a bad time. Another [Spellsword] was throwing bubbles of Water around people’s heads, then nimbly dodging every counterattack while they slowly suffocated. A group was shivering under lethally low temperatures, the caster of the skill strolling through the polar zone like it was nothing, neatly stabbing people too cold to fight back.

Yet it wasn’t just fantastical [Mage] skills being thrown around. A woman, clearly rich or noble, was gracefully flying from fight to fight, using only a sword with an impossibly long ribbon trailing from the pommel. Everywhere she went people died, and when the cavalry looked like they were going to catch her, she simply stepped off, flying to another spot. A squad of soldiers flipped their shields around, the backs polished to a Mirror brightness, shining blinding, burning Radiance at people. Powerful warriors hacked and slashed, each blow going through two or three soldiers at once. Others jumped into the middle of formations, boldly fighting while surrounded by a dozen soldiers - and winning. A fisherman was casting around the field, grabbing heads and reeling them back in.

Soldiers pushed their brothers and sisters-in-arms off to the side, selflessly taking a blow meant for them, laying down their lives for a friend. Soldiers pushed their brothers and sisters-in-arms into the path of a spear, using their closest comrades as a shield.

I liked to believe there was more of the first than the second.

Grizzled old men had just as much business being on the battlefield as small bands of plucky teenagers, the two of them inexpertly trying to kill each other.

That was a small snapshot of what I could see in the moment.n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

My nose was assaulted by the acrid tang of thousands of spilled gallons of blood, mountains of shit, and enough piss to fill a few horse troughs.

I could taste most of the smells, they were so strong, and I’d never before so keenly regretted improving my senses.

Some of the blows were so powerful they caused vicious shockwaves to echo across the battlefield, even up to where we were on the cliff.

I was already blasting my healing. All skills were going, to the best of my ability, their range maximized.

[*ding!* [Cosmic Presence] leveled up! 340 -> 341]

I smiled at the notification and turned off all notifications that weren’t me being directly involved in a fight, my ‘idle thoughts’ process tumbling down a rabbit hole as the rest were focusing on healing.

I’d classed up to [The Dawn Sentinel] in the wake of the Formorian war, where so often I’d been called in for mass casualty and healing events. Then after the war, I just… hadn’t been involved in another war. My ability to heal people had grown by massive leaps and bounds as my knowledge and magical stats skyrocketed, and I just hadn’t found myself in a situation where there were more people to heal than I could handle.

Osengard had pushed me, but my regeneration, combined with the relatively small cost of each heal, had let me keep on top of it. Drilling with the Sixth had let [Cosmic Presence] start leveling again, but I was stepping into a situation I knew I couldn’t hope to keep on top of.

I had vast mana reserves and strong regeneration, not to speak of my magic power letting me use all of it. But it wasn’t nearly enough for the scale I was operating at. I could maybe handle the size or the time, but not both. Which is where [Cosmic Presence] came to shine.

The skill was a passive. It ate some mana regeneration, but dramatically boosted people’s natural regeneration hundreds of times over. A simple cut would scab over in a second, bruises would almost immediately vanish, and infections would be smothered in the crib before they even got a chance to get started.

All minor things.

It wasn’t going to be regrowing an arm that had been hacked off, and many lethal blows remained lethal.

Almost lethal blows though?

Different story.

The effects stacked with each other. The body wasn’t a single thing, it was a thousand different processes and organs working together in perfect tandem. A bone-deep cut would sever a dozen different things, from skin, to muscle, tendons, nerves and chipped bone. A cut like that would normally bleed like hell and require bandages and significant time. The blood flooding the area would cause things to shift, and it’d all just go wrong.

[Cosmic Presence] changed all that. Clotting would be near-instant, and there wouldn’t be time for muscles to shift. There wouldn’t be time for nerve endings to misalign and never heal. Tendons would snap back together, and a relatively clean cut would vanish like it’d never existed.

It was far more complicated than that in truth, but that gave the basic gist of things.

The range had slowly grown with time, as my magic power increased, and while I didn’t have exact numbers on it - what was I going to do, make everyone stand shoulder to shoulder and slice themselves open to see what my range was? - I knew it was well over a 300 meter sphere centered on where I was. I did get a nice confirmation that it was larger than my range on [Wheel of Sun and Moon] just now, and grimly, I’d be able to see and measure exactly how large my radius was in a minute.

My eyes widened as I got an idea of just how foolish I’d been, just how badly I’d underestimated [Cosmic Presence].

The battlefield was on a flattish plains, so the fighting was well spread out. It was hard to pick out every single detail over the few miles of fighting, and I couldn’t pick out exactly where the edge of [Cosmic Presence] was.

I did mentally measure it at clear over a kilometer.

I shivered at it.

I’d known for a while that I was passing over human limits, becoming more powerful than most mortals ever would.

The world had an omnipresent indicator of the utter peak of System magic - the baleful Dragoneye Moons that stared down at us every night, Lun’Kat’s eternal gaze. The strongest skills in Mirage, famous for having a longer range than most other elements, could hit the moon.

I wasn’t there yet.

But I did have my first skill measured in kilometers. I was slowly transitioning into the high-powered Immortal ranks.

The very same ranks that set off world-shaking Immortal wars.

Speaking of [Wheel], it was going full blast, although with a fraction of the range that [Cosmic Presence] enjoyed. I was kicking myself. When I’d designed my skills, I hadn’t quite considered the full impact of the various range-related stars in each constellation, and how I’d filled each up with starlight. I had no idea

that my healing-related magic power would get so large. [Wheel of Sun and Moon] was a supplemental skill to [Dance with the Heavens], and it required an image to function off. A really complex image because I needed to include multiple elvenoid species, each with their own unique biology. Before [Astral Archives] came along, I’d needed to painstakingly recreate the image every time I wanted to use it, getting every detail right from the smallest of catalysts to the largest traumas, and every single type of injury and the most efficient way to fix them. Instead, I’d already done that, and spent countless months with the Sixth refining the image to only fix the worst of injuries, and leave people in a position where [Cosmic Presence] could do the rest. Bruises, hairline fractures, shallow cuts, armor dents and more were left off the list, to conserve the mana to handle more injuries. That, and [Cosmic Presence] could pick up the slack.

The solution was less than elegant. I saved a tiny percentage of mana rebuilding my image like that. Large, traumatic injuries took up most of the mana I was spending, and arguably all the small stuff I wasn’t fixing wouldn’t even add up to a single large wound.

But it might. Over time, over the hours, I might save enough mana to fix a single injury. To save one more life.

It brought warmth to my heart to see my healing wash over the battlefield. It made my soul sing to its very core to see all the lives I’d just yanked out of Black Crow’s grip all at once. My mana was dropping fast, but my presence on the edge of the cliff, watching over the battlefield was a promise.

None shall die while I am here.

I was invisible, but Iona knew me too well. She stepped up next to me in full armor, sunlight gleaming off her winged helmet. The Valkyrie slammed the end of her glaive into the rock, a solid message of defiance against the bale winds that blew over the battle.

Black Crow appeared in front of me, flapping and cawing unhappily for a moment before vanishing once again, down to the field to reap lives.

Outside of my circle of influence.

My mana was dropping like a clay ox into the ocean, and I didn’t think I’d be able to keep this up for long. My range was too far, with too many people hellbent on killing each other. My ‘premium’ heals would only hold for so long before I was running on fumes, mana regeneration, and [Cosmic Presence], but while I was here, I mattered.

Two women were sliced in half, their bodies reforming as the blade rippled through them like water. Half their clothing and their spears didn’t survive the blow, but they did, stabbing the surprised warrior in the face.

I saved him too.

There was a strong argument what I was doing was fucking stupid. I was stepping into a warzone where both sides were actively killing each other, and I was healing everyone I could… so they could better hack and slash at each other until I ran out of mana, then went back to killing each other.

Yet.

I believed, with no good evidence for it, with the greatest of hubris, that my actions mattered. That some of the lives would be saved, that people would be better off for it all. That a few poor souls would end up alive instead of dead.

My work was probably best done around the battle. Before and after. Cleaning the aftermath, helping pull people from the brink.

That wasn’t who I was. That wasn’t what I’d sworn to do. I’d regenerate the mana, and I’d do those tasks as well.

The Acid clouds tried to roll into my section and were stopped cold. Everyone who would’ve suffered a horrible death to them instead shrugged it off like it was nothing, and further shrugged off when another devastating fireball erupted around them.

Huh. There were a lot of fireballs going around the Acid clouds.

A man fell over, riddled with arrows, then got back up the next moment. A woman took an artillery shot to the chest and kept walking. The blow blasted half of her still-beating heart into the hands of the soldier behind her, who took a moment to realize with horror what he was holding and threw it into the churning gore-mud they were all marching over. A cavalry unit, lead by one of the generals, bisected and trampled a woman. She looked a little beaten by it all, but soon recovered, springing to her feet again.

I couldn’t save them all. One dullahan made his armor flow like water, suffocating the person he was fighting. I had nothing for suffocation. An elite brought down a warhammer bigger than I was on a person’s head, instantly killing them.

I guess that was one way to know that I couldn’t fix ‘head pulped to nothing’ problems without getting into the situation myself. Hopefully my backup brains would kick in if that ever happened to me…

Lastly were the third types. The awkward in the middle problems. The people stuck between life and death, Black Crow’s claws sunk firmly into their soul and refusing to let go. I focused on a particularly good example, my ethics ramming into stone cold practicality.

The woman who’d been gracefully soaring across the battlefield had gotten caught. Chains had grabbed her ankle, preventing her escape, and more and more of them had wrapped around her as people seized the opportunity. She was far behind enemy lines, no help was coming, her blade was shattered on the ground, and the soldiers around her were enthusiastically stabbing her with everything they had. Didn’t matter that the wounds instantly healed up, they just stabbed her again and again, some leaving their spears in her, others twisting viciously to cause as much damage as possible. She screamed in violating agony with every blow, trying to thrash against the chains that stubbornly insisted that she die. The people stabbing her knew whatever skill was keeping her alive had to have a limit, and they were going to take great pleasure in stabbing her until they found it.

Mana was mana. It cost as much to heal a blow the fifth time as it did the first, and a stab wound was roughly the same cost as another to heal. Numerous factors changed the details, but the broad cold truth remained the same.

She was doomed. There was no rescue coming. Every stab of hers that I healed was a stab on someone else I wouldn’t be able to fix in just a few minutes when my mana ran out. She was ‘spending’ the lives of dozens of people just to extend her existence by a few agonizing seconds.

There wasn’t even a case to be made that she was tying down soldiers who’d otherwise be occupied. She was in a solid block of enemy troops.

There was only one Elaine. I was only one person. I had to choose.

Did I prolong a single life, at the expense of dozens?

The answer was all too easy.

[Wheel of Sun and Moon] didn’t let me explicitly exclude people. I could pick as many people as I wanted to be impacted, or I could pick a range, a direction, even vague shapes, and heal everyone inside of it. I didn’t have a ‘fuck you in particular’ aspect to the skill, even though some area of effect skills did.

However, I did have strong control over my image. I modified the image I was using to explicitly exclude the woman, and my heart died as I passed the executioner’s sentence.

I forced my eyes to remain open, even as they blurred with tears, as five lances plunged into her arching body, her mouth opened in one last begging scream.

I wasn’t cold. I wasn’t uncaring. It was just… necessary.

I don’t think it would’ve been a comfort to her, doubly so if she knew I was likely going to be healing some of her killers. The subtle distinction would be lost.

It was the right thing to do.

Why did it hurt so much?