Chapter 28 - Too late

The last mile was spent running through a destroyed wasteland.  All of the trees were down, and the skies were… well, a shadow filled nightmare.

Badgelor was surrounded by two dead behir, ghastly wounds covering both.  One of the massive creatures twitched as I approached, but a blast of plasma to the creature’s unprotected belly silenced it.  I doubted it would have been much of an issue, though I was curious how Badgelor had managed to take all of its legs off.

The third behir died at the entrance of the cavern, with a mangled war badger in its jaws.

I picked up Badgelor, and started walking to the cavern.  I dumped healing into him, but it turned out to be unnecessary.

“In Earthanese, he popped a fuse in his mana network,” said Shart looking through a vocabulary list.  “I do not know what a fuse is.”

“I do,” I replied.  “Will he be, okay?”

“Yes, his body will ‘reset’ naturally, given enough time,” said Shart.

Badgelor’s body twitched for a moment and started moving, causing an equal amount of hope and despair to fill me, then he was still. Still like the other three war badgers. As Jarra prayed, a war badger’s body simply floated over next to the cavern entrance.

She wouldn’t look at me.

“Any survivors?” I asked.

Bashara noticed my approach and shook her head.  “They had what amounted to a penal colony here.  Mother would occasionally take a few of them for reagents.  The shield wall collapsed and they attempted to escape.  They were doing fine until they got to this forest.”

“The behir?” I asked.

“There were several behir, it is entirely possibly the behir in the castle was just there looking for them,” said Bashara glancing over at Badgelor.  “Not that Badgie believed it.  Blames himself, like usual.”

Shart shook his head, “If one of those had gotten through the gate there wouldn’t have been much of Ordinal left by the time I contained it.”

“Badgelor saved the world, again,” I said looking down at my unconscious friend. He wouldn’t apricate that.

“You look, alright?” I asked.  Bashara raised an eyebrow.

“I’m not a front-line fighter, and I wasn’t going to get between a war badger and their opponent in any case,” said Bashara gesturing over to the pile of corpses, “But I did my share, more than my share really.  War badgers are highly resistant to certain kinds of mental magic, so I didn’t need to waste any mana shielding my allies.”

Bashara was a high-level Mental Magic specialist.  She could charm, enchant, or confuse people with equal skill.  I’d seen her on the battlefield before, and she had always been quite effective.  I hated to imagine her now with so many more levels under her belt.

“We need to go,” said Bashara, looking out over the devastation.  She looked at me for a long moment as if to say something, then changed her mind.  “Tell Jarra.  She won’t leave here.  You might have to force the issue.”

“Why is that?” I asked looking over at Jarra uncomfortably.

Bashara said nothing, there was really nothing to say.  I started walking over, trying to see the Jarra I remembered in her current body.  She had been a young woman, determined, and in her mid-20’s.  She looked old now, like a woman at the end of her journey.

“Hey, you,” I said, smiling at her.  She turned away.

“You should go,” she said finally, trying to fill her voice with resolve.

“We are all leaving,” I smiled comfortingly.

She attempted to rise, stumbled slightly, and then tried again before rising to her full height.  Or at least as much of that as she could still manage.  She came up to my shoulder once, now she couldn’t even straighten up enough to look past my sternum.  “I’m dead, Jim.”

“I’ll fix it,” I said.

“You’ll fix my youth getting sucked out,” snarled Jarra, twisting her head to look at me.  She was not a healthy old woman.

“Yes,” I said.  “I found you, didn’t I?”

“How long did that take,” she spat back.

“Three days since I figured out where you were,” I said.

“That’s kind of subjective,” said Shart.  “The time in the tunnel operated differently so more like a week.”

“Well, you found me,” she said looking into my eyes.  One of her eyes was glassy, blind.  I reached my hand out to activate treatment and she pushed it away.  “I’m old Jim, everything is falling apart.  You don’t think I’d have fixed myself if I could?”

“Can’t I infuse her with life energy,” I said.

“That just makes her old and full of energy, it won’t fix the radiant mana situation and if you do it for too long it causes other issues if you aren’t careful,” said Shart.

“Could I transfer some of my Radiant mana to her?” I asked.

“That amount is tied to your body and not possible to transfer using Magic or Stamina based techniques.”

“I’m a Tier 2 body, how does that work?” I asked.

“You are young, basically less than a year old in system terms.  Your maximum Radiant mana started out at 50 for an adventurer, and doubled when you took a tier 2 body.  You still have 98 points of radiant mana in hell.  With that much radiant mana you’d live for over two hundred years.  Jarra has 2 points, she’s got maybe a month when we get back. “

“That math doesn’t add up,” I said.

“What, 100 points equals 200 years but 2 points equals a month?” said Shart.  “The number drops constantly, but your tier 2 body recovers it.  Jarra is in a tier one body at the end of its lifespan, it decays faster and replenishes slower.”

That was just like Ordinal, all sorts of terrible all the time.

“I’ll figure it out,” I said to Jarra.  “It's just a number.”

Jarra looked at me, her eyes suddenly bright with tears.  She was bitter, but who wouldn’t be.  She had been stuck with a monster while I’d been galivanting around with princesses.  Jarra’s whole future had been drained away from her while I’d wasted time thinking she was dead.

“Fine,” she said finally, slumping into my arms. “But you are wasting your time with me.”

I picked her up, let her rest her head on my shoulder and started walking towards the exit.  Bashara shot up with alacrity and followed me.  Glancing over to the unconscious Badgelor on my left shoulder and Shart riding on my right shoulder.

“Do you need to carry me,” asked Bashara cautiously.

“No, this always just seems to happen,” I said looking around. Super hell looked worse than when we’d come down, and the ghastly horrors that existed only in nightmares were all dead and scattered.

I felt frail sleeping Jarra in my hands, and the mass of poor Badgelor on my shoulder and realized something terrible. I couldn’t do this forever. It was too painful. Even if the whole world was at stake, there were only so many times you could ask someone to do this before they cracked.

Before they broke.

Before they went absolutely insane.

I gave hell one last look and stepped through the portal back to Ordinal.