Vanessa did not even know she had fallen unconscious until a cold chill woke her up. The pain and exhaustion hit her like a storm, her limbs hanging hollow of strength beside her. She barely had the energy to open her eyes and look at a dark figure kneeling above her.
A stream of freezing energy poured into her body, suddenly waking her up and lightening the grogginess in her head and clearing up her blurry eyesight.
It was Lina’s impassive face, bruise and bloody, but generally unharmed as it looked down on her.
"The team leader has ordered us to recover quickly," Lina said, her voice completely level. "Can you recover on your own? If so, I can attend to the others."
Vanessa became aware of a tall mud wall surrounding their group, leaving them out of view of the fight, yet the fight was still going on. The roaring and hissing of beasts could not be blocked by the walls, nor could the sounds of weapons clashing.
She lifted her hand and discovered that she was unable to close her hands into a fist. Her forearms were completely spent, and it would be a wonder if she could grab her daggers at all, let alone use them.
Her aether control, however, had recovered considerably.
"Yeah, I can heal myself. You said team leader? Is Nero back?" she asked, her mind slowly starting to work.
"Yes. He is holding off the enemies, and has asked us to heal in the meantime," Lina answered as she got up and moved towards Bael and Noman. She had healed two other soldiers before waking Vanessa.
One was the only other remaining soldier capable of fighting. Though he was wounded, he retained minimal combat capabilities. He was sitting in a corner, using some card to heal as quickly as possible.
The other soldier lay on the ground, looking up into the sky listlessly. He did not move, nor make any attempts to recover. Although he had temporarily been healed, it was unlikely he would live for long.
"Dave might try to poison Nero too," Vanessa said as she picked up her card case and began shuffling through her cards. "In fact, he definitely will. If he already poisoned everyone before the mission even started, then Nero’s in grave trouble. We need to warn him."
"We need to recover our strength first," said Vanessa as she squatted next to Bael. "If we attract any attention, the beasts might attack us again, and we’re in no condition to fight them off. The leader will then be distracted and be even more vulnerable."
Vanessa grit her teeth, but she couldn’t argue with Lina. The fact that they were alive was a miracle to begin with, and the fact that Nero was holding off all those beasts, and probably holding off Dave too was, in itself, another miracle.
Lina turned away from Bael, who was snoring softly, and first healed Noman, who was on the verge of death. It was unlikely he would recover enough to fight, but at least he might not die.
Then, when she had ensured that he would not die at least in the short term, she turned back to Bael. She took out a card, ready to use it, but to Vanessa’s immense surprise, Lina first wound her hand back and slapped Bael hard across the face.
Bael woke up, if only slightly. His eyes struggled to open and he blurted sounds as if he was drunk. Vanessa placed her hand on his brow, as if using the Eldrim card, while with her other hand she cut open Bael’s wrists, causing him to bleed heavily.
"What are you doing?" Vanessa asked in alarm when she saw the scene.
"Blood loss will not kill him, but it will allow him to quickly remove the sedative in his blood. His innate ability is passive and has already kicked in, meaning he is already generating more blood. All I need to do is make sure he stays awake long enough for enough of the sedative to leave his system."
Even in the deathly critical situation, Vanessa could not help but drop her jaw at what she heard. Only a Kolari could come up with such an extreme measure to heal. Then again, as long as it worked, she didn’t care.
Vanessa closed her eyes to speed up her recovery, doing her best so that she could regain even a modicum of her fighting strength. But time, it seemed, was not on their side.
The mud broke apart as a flaming figure rushed through, quickly glancing at the situation there.
"Can you guys hold them off for a few minutes?" Nero suddenly asked, his expression extremely strained.
"We will," Lina answered, standing up from a bloody Bael, who was slowly regaining his senses. Vanessa, too, stood up despite her horrible condition. The third soldier also stepped forward, despite using a spear to support him from falling down. It seemed he had a serious knee injury which made it difficult for him to fight.
"A few minutes is all I need," Nero said, before sitting down in the blood covered ground and closing his eyes.
A few black arrows shot through the air at Nero, but Lina knocked them out of the air.
Blocked by beasts, Dave could not immediately follow, but he attacked from afar nevertheless, not giving them a moment’s relief.
The beasts, too, seemed unwilling to let Nero recover, and resumed their attack on the group. They had learned how formidable Nero was, and knew it was best to finish him off while he seemed injured.
It seemed almost impossible for the three of them, wounded as they were, to hold off the beasts. But that is exactly what they did, because the only alternative was death.
Nero sensed much of what was happening around him, but he couldn’t afford to help even though he wanted to. Unlike the others, Nero’s poison was not meant to collapse or subdue - it was meant to kill! There were two fundamental reasons why Nero had managed to survive, so far at least.
The first was, naturally, his body, which was far stronger than Dave had anticipated. The amount of poison used was not nearly enough to kill him, but it could still greatly weaken him and cause harm. Fighting with that in his system was basically impossible.
The second reason was Dr. Iris’ treatment. Before leaving on his last mission, the good doctor had imbued his body with numerous supportive energies which protected his body from greater harm and reinforced his organs and bones.
These two factors had combined together and kept Nero from succumbing to the poison, but they could not keep him in top fighting form. If he did not detox his body immediately, he would not be able to continue fighting. Without his support, their current predicament could not be resolved, and chances were high that they would die there.
That was precisely why Nero had to take such a big risk by having the others protect him, but desperate times called for desperate measures.
Speaking of which, Nero did not have any detox cards which could work as effectively and as quickly as he would need them to. That left him with only one option. He, too, needed to become an Initiate.
It was far from ideal, but the evolution his body would undergo upon becoming an Initiate should , theoretically, be enough to ignore the poison. After all, the amount of strength one gained upon becoming an Initiate was directly proportional to the strength and foundation of one’s body before the level up.
Nero’s body was basically at the limit of what a Neophyte could achieve, at least as far as the Radix Augmentation card was concerned.
Tuning out the sounds of the fight, Nero relaxed his aether, and allowed his absorption of his innate card to reach 40%. It hardly took a dozen seconds, and the transition was initiated seamlessly, as if he had been ready for it for a long time already.
"Hold the line," someone yelled, yet to Nero it was a distant voice, barely recognizable. Around him, the three fought off calamity, using only their cards and their bodies.
They fought for him. They fought because he could not. Because he was their hope - and their leader.
The aether thickened still as it began to swirl around Nero. It was no longer air but pressure - waves of icy chill and presence rolling outward from the still form of the man at the center. His body shuddered. A breath hitched. Then another.
A thin sheet of ice formed beneath him, covering the ground, and then cracked, thin fissures spreading out like spider web. The colour of the flame still burning around his body somehow deepened, and gained a radiance that seemed not of their world.
The beasts who were aggressively attacking the trio paused, as they cautiously looked towards the burning human, yet what they saw was nothing human. Only flame, and beyond it, a pair of cold, furious eyes.
A chill, not one caused by temperature, but by fear, spread through the beasts, as they recognized the ancient aura in those flames.