Chapter 604: Miss Leana Vs Grade Three Demon II
The explosions continued.
Some of the students were trying to track the movements, to read through the barrier’s shimmer and the periodic flashes of released essence some indication of what was happening inside.
The barrier did not cooperate. What reached them was force and sound and the occasional visible surge of essence against the construct’s inner face, none of it resolving into legible action.
It was moving too fast.
That was the conclusion that spread quietly through the watching students. Not the scale of the impacts, not the grade of what Leana was fighting. The speed. The fact that the movements inside the barrier were generating that much force at an interval too rapid to follow was a piece of information that arrived without requiring anyone to say it directly.
Questions moved through the students in the quiet.
Some of them spoke theirs aloud. Some kept them internal. Some had articulate, specific questions that they knew the shape of. Some had something less formed, more fundamental, that had not yet resolved into language.
Would they get there?
Some of the students asking themselves this were asking from a place of genuine uncertainty, the question carrying anxiety about whether the gap between themselves and what was inside that barrier was bridgeable within any timeline they could imagine.
Some were asking from a place of determined pragmatism, the question carrying the specific quality of students who would go back to their dormitories tonight and add what they had seen to the list of reasons the next morning’s training session needed to be harder than the previous one.
Some were not asking at all.
Some were watching the barrier with the specific quality of attention that did not contain a question because the question had already been answered, the only remaining item being the work required to make the answer true.
Elias was one of those.
He was not standing. His condition after the barrier and the teleportation and two hours of sustained field management did not permit standing without assistance, and the healer who had reached him in the corridor had made that point with enough clinical authority that he had accepted the seated position on the ground that had been strongly suggested.
He was watching.
His essence was gone. Not depleted in the way that sustained combat depleted reserves, the kind that recovered through rest and conversion. Gone in the more complete sense of a core that had been fed everything it contained into a single construct and had nothing remaining in its channels. The recovery from this would be measured in days rather than hours.
None of that was occupying his attention.
His attention was on the barrier.
On the explosions. On the force reaching them across the field. On the specific quality of the power being exchanged inside that construct, which his field awareness, even in its current severely limited state, could read as something above what he had encountered in anything he had personally engaged.
He wanted it.
Not the specific fight. Not that demon. But the level that was expressed by the person fighting it, the capability that allowed someone to enter a contained space with something of that grade and produce exchanges of that magnitude and remain in the engagement rather than surviving it through attrition.
He wanted to be where she was.
Not immediately. Not through some shortcut. Through the specific, sustained, accumulating work of getting there the way she had gotten there, whatever that looked like across the years it required.
He just wanted to know that the direction existed.
The barrier told him it did.
That was enough to keep him sitting upright, watching, not resting until the fight inside that barrier reached its conclusion.
On the far edge of the field, away from the barrier’s audience, a different scene was occupying a different quality of attention.
Damon sat beside the medical position that had been established for the corridor’s casualties and was not looking at the barrier.
He was looking at Daveon.
The healer who had gotten to the corridor had assessed quickly and communicated clearly. Daveon’s ribs were fractured. Not some of them — the plural was doing significant work.
The fractures had produced secondary damage, bone fragments in places that bone fragments should not be, internal pressure against organs that were managing the presence because Daveon’s body was functioning at the level of someone whose grade made survival of this kind of damage possible.
He would survive.
That was the medical statement. Accurate, certain, communicated without hesitation.
Damon heard it and did not find it as reassuring as it was intended to be.
Anaya was beside him, conscious, her own injuries addressed to the degree of stability rather than resolution. Broken ribs. The specific damage of having received Daveon’s unconscious body at velocity while already in a combat stance that had not been prepared for impact from that direction. Her face carried the particular expression of someone managing pain they were not discussing.
Celeste had bones broken. Fewer than Anaya, differently distributed, the angle of impact having found different stress points. She was conscious and communicating in complete sentences with the healer, which was Celeste being Celeste regardless of the circumstances.
Damon looked at Daveon.
At the specific quality of unconscious that Daveon was, the deep, complete absence of the composed, observational presence that Daveon was in any other state. At the bound and treated and stabilized condition of someone who had thrown himself at a Grade Three demon with a frost spear to interrupt an attack that would have killed people he cared about.
"I shouldn’t have left," Damon said.
Not loudly. The words had the quality of something that had been waiting since the moment he had arrived at the corridor and found what he had found.
The healer who had been finishing a treatment nearby heard it. Did not look up from the work immediately. Finished the application and then did look, the assessment in her eyes the kind that came from someone who had been in enough of these situations to know the shape of what she was hearing.
"If you had been there with him," she said, "you would be lying next to him."
Damon looked at her.
"The impact from that tail," she continued, the clinical voice of someone stating evidence rather than comforting, "sent your teammate across a significant distance at force sufficient to fracture every rib in his chest. You would not have withstood that better than he did. You would have withstood it worse." A pause. "You might have died."
The word settled in the quiet around them.
"The corridor held," she said. "Your teammates held it. The outcome would not have been better if you had been here. It might have been considerably worse."
Damon was quiet.
He looked at Daveon again.
"The future," the healer said, and her voice had changed slightly, the clinical edge softening toward something that was still not sentiment but was not purely clinical either, "will not offer you the option of regretting who was where when something happened. It will offer you the option of being capable enough that where you are matters more."
She picked up her kit.
"The battles ahead of you will not have instructors watching from the sidelines. They will not have barriers erected by someone else protecting your teammates while you’re elsewhere on the field. They will have you and your capability and what you’ve built before you get to them." She looked at him directly. "If you want to not have this feeling again, that is the only path available."
She moved to her next patient.
Damon sat.
Beside him, Anaya had been quiet through the exchange. She reached out without looking at him and found his arm and held it with the specific quality of someone who did not have a different truth to offer but understood that he was sitting with a difficult one.
He looked at the barrier.
At the explosions still coming from inside it.
At the scale of what was being produced by the fight inside that construct and what it represented as a distance between where he was and where he needed to be.
He added that distance to the accounting he was running.
Then he looked back at Daveon.
And sat.
And waited for his teammate to wake up.