Ch: 117.5 (Patreon)

Fuck that snake; I curse in my head. The damn thing just had to spit on us before we got away.

Still holding on to Tabitha by the scruff of her armor, we tumble down into the dark ruins below. Almost as soon as we jumped in the hole I created, it was covered again, either by bones or the snake itself. Either way, there was no light.

Thanks to Sense Mana, I knew this shaft was here, but I didn't have time to scan very far down before I was forced to grab Tabitha and run for it. We were rapidly approaching the bottom, but that wasn’t my biggest concern at the moment.

The shaft wasn’t big enough for the massive snake to follow us, but we were still in danger. The mist it hit us with was the scariest substance I’ve ever encountered. No matter what I did with Mana Skin, the poison refused to come off, and it was rapidly eating through my defenses.

It was almost like the poison was alive. Like a million tiny worms, the stuff was slowly digging through my mana barriers and would soon reach my skin, and I highly doubted my measly Poison Resistance would be able to do anything once it did.

I needed to get it off me fast, but first things first. Despite Master telling me never to do so and knowing it was wrong to let go of my weapon purposely, I toss my hammer to the side while we’re falling. My weapon was covered in poison, and I didn’t have the mana to waste securing it to my back. Plus, I needed both my hands free.

Before we crash into the bottom of the ruins, I pull Tabitha close to my chest and use my hands to support her the best I can. I paid particular attention to her left arm, which looked like it was hanging on by a thread. While I slow us using Air Walk, I hear my hammer crash below us. The sound echoes off the ruin’s walls and rings in my ears, but I ignore the noise and focus on Tabitha.

As soon as my feet meet the ground, I use Sense Mana to scan our surroundings, unable to see a thing in the darkness. We were currently in 400 square foot room, and thankfully, there was nothing dangerous down here waiting for us.

Taking care not to move her unnecessarily, I lay Tabitha on the ground away from the shaft we fell through in case the snake tried to breathe any more of its toxic mist down on us. Once I have her lying down, I work on conjuring some light. Sense Mana was great for some things, but I still needed to see Tabitha to figure out how to treat her.

“Cicsh het ploe-,” I start to recite my light spell, but halfway through, I start coughing and taste blood in my mouth.

Shit! I start to panic. The poison had finally made its way through Mana Skin, and I almost immediately started feeling sick.

I try to catch my breath, but my lungs feel like they’re melting in my chest. My strength was quickly fading, but I couldn't give up after making it this far!

Despite the pain, I force myself to recite my light spell. “Cicsh het ploetts lages!”

A ball of light forms above my head, and I nearly barf seeing Tabitha's mangled form before me. She was almost entirely white, except for her dark and pulsating veins. Unfortunately, I wasn't much better. The veins on my arms were darkening rapidly, too, a sign that the poison was spreading quickly.

I needed to find a way to treat us, but first, I needed to remove the remaining poison covering us.

Wheezing and coughing up more blood, I do the only thing I can think of; I recite the spell I use almost daily.

“Ahyt ls weem appiss!”

A purifying white light covers my body, but it only helps me. So, using Empowered Spell, I pump obnoxious amounts of mana into my basic cleaning spell until the light covering me expands to include Tabitha.

The tenacious poison is strong enough to resist my magic, so I need to channel even more of my mana to combat it, but eventually, the poison clinging to us starts to flake away.

Good, now how do I fix the poison already in our systems!?

"My bag," I hear a tiny voice, followed by coughing.

My eyes practically turned the size of dinner plates because, somehow, Tabitha was still conscious. But what was that about her bag?

Oh yeah! Now I remember; her emergency satchel.

Fumbling over Tabitha, I reach for the small enchanted bag on her belt. She told me it was enchanted to protect the potions held within. So, if Tabitha is telling me to grab her bag, she must have something to deal with the poison, or at least that's what I'm hoping. Because if not, we're both dead.

I try to unfasten Tabitha's pouch, only to realize I was losing feeling in my fingers. My Health was plummeting at an unprecedented rate, and it was only a matter of seconds until I passed out. So, I give up on untying the enchanted bag and rip it open with what little strength I have left.

Inside the satchel, illuminated by my magic, were six small vials. Two vials contained an orange substance, two were jet black, and two were teal. “Which ones?” I cough.

“Bla-," Tabitha couldn't even say the entire word, but it was enough.

With shaking hands, I grab the two vials. I struggle to remove their stoppers, but death is a surprisingly good motivator. As soon as I uncork the first tonic, I don't hesitate to dump the contents of the vial into my mouth and swallow, despite it smelling like rotting flesh and tasting similar.

I don’t wait for the potion to take effect before I try to pour the second one into Tabitha’s mouth, only she does the unthinkable. As I bring the open vial up to her mouth, Tabitha closes her mouth and feebly tries to turn her head away from me.

“No,” I hear her rasp.

“What are you doing? You’re dying,” I practically scream in her face out of frustration.

“I must,” Tabitha feebly tells me.

“What bullshit are you on about?” I complain without coughing. Whatever I drank was kicking in. My Health wasn't recovering, but at least it was no longer decreasing. “Why do you need to die?!”

“So, you can,” Tabitha slowly answers me with blood dripping from her eyeballs. “Be rescued,” she struggles to finish.

"How is your dying going to get me rescued?" I fumed, trying to force the vial into Tabitha's mouth.

As I’m trying to force the tonic on Tabitha, I push against her chest plate, hoping to stop her from squirming and aggravating her wounds further. While touching her armor, I finally recognized what Tabitha was doing. She was still trying to sacrifice herself for me.

Tabitha’s armor had yet to activate, meaning her Health wasn’t low enough yet. She didn’t want to take the antidote because she wanted her armor's last response to trigger and notify Pacore that we were in trouble. But if that happened, the shield her armor would conjure would keep me from administering the antitoxin. And unless her shield can remove toxins from her body, it will be impossible to save her once it's up. Instead of it being a life-saving shield, her armor would become her coffin.

“It’s for the best,” Tabitha struggles to say.

At this point, I’m struggling to hold back my anger. How can she be so willing to sacrifice herself for me? Didn’t she understand how that would make me feel?

No, just like above, I refuse to let Tabitha give up her life for me.

Lifting the last vial of black potion to my mouth, I empty its contents. It tasted foul keeping it in my mouth, and though I wanted to spit it out, I suppressed the urge to do so.

Tabitha was surprised by my actions which helped in what I did next. With one hand, I pinch Tabitha's nose, and with the other, I force her jaw open. Tabitha was extremely weak at the moment, so while she struggled in my grasp, I easily overpowered her.

Leaning in, I lock lips with Tabitha and force her to drink the disgusting tonic against her will.

This wasn't like in the movies where Tabitha and I shared a romantic moment. The tonic made me want to barf, and while Tabitha was beautiful in her own way, I didn’t think of her like that, and I’m sure neither did she. Tabitha was my mentor and was more like a big sister or an aunt to me. I only administered the antidote to her like this because it was the only way I could think of to get her to take it.

After I force all the tonic into her mouth, I pull back and use my hand to massage her throat, making sure she swallowed all of it and didn't spit even a single drop out.

“You fool; you needed that spare potion in case you were poisoned again," Tabitha glares at me after I let her go.

"I don't care. Either we both make it out, or neither of us does," I yell at her.

Tabitha’s glare softens into a look of defeat. “Thank you, but you still haven’t saved me. On the contrary, you only prolonged my suffering." Tabitha's eyes shift down to her arms. They were barely bleeding anymore, but that was more because Tabitha was almost out of blood rather than because she was healing. It was only due to her high stats that she hadn't already died from blood loss, but even that wouldn't save her for long.

Tabitha was deathly pale, and she was right; if I didn’t do something quickly, it wouldn't matter that I saved her from the toxin. But I wasn’t going to stop trying now.

Reaching into Tabitha's satchel again, I pull out the remaining four vials. "Which of these will heal you?” I hold the vials in front of her face. “If you don’t tell me, I’ll force you to drink all four of them,” I threaten when she remains silent.

“You would doom me to a life like that?” Tabitha asks somberly. Again, she glances at her arms. “One of the blue potions will help me recover my Health, but they can’t fix my arms as they are. My arms will heal wrong, causing more problems. You would need to amputate them before administering it.”

At least I know the antitoxin is working because Tabitha could talk more without coughing, but was she telling me I would need to chop off her arms to save her!? That would be a fate worse than death for a person like Tabitha.

“Let me die,” Tabitha orders me in a soft voice.

"Shut up; I'm thinking,” I snap back. I had the potions; I just needed a way to fix her arms.

I could..... In the heat of the moment, another crazy idea pops into my head. That could work, but could I pull it off?

Setting the two teal vials to the side, I hold up the orange vials. "If the black ones were for poisons, and the blue ones were for healing, what would the orange ones do? Do they recover mana?" It only made sense she would carry the three types of potions that one would commonly need.

“They do,” Tabitha slowly answers.

I grin manically; this can work!

Uncorking one of the orange vials, I quickly down the syrupy potion. I move to uncork the second one, but Tabitha stops me. "Don't; you'll poison yourself if you drink both at once," she warns me.

Growling in annoyance, I set the second orange potion off to the side. I'll just have to make do with what I had.

Almost immediately, I could feel the mana-restoring potion working in my stomach. It wasn't helping me absorb more mana like I thought it might; instead, it boosted the rate my body converted ambient mana into my own personal mana. And quite rapidly, I might add, which was infinitely better.

When I took the antitoxin, I didn't think about it, but what tier were these potions? For them to have such strong effects, they couldn't be low-tier.

What was I thinking about at a time like this; I shake my head to dismiss those unimportant thoughts. I was on a time crunch and needed to hurry. I needed to put my crazy plan into action.

With part of my strength returning to me, I remove Tabitha’s sword sheath from her belt. “This is going to hurt,” I tell Tabitha as I fish my canvas tarp out of my bag and rip it into thin shreds.

Before she can tell me not to bother, I grab Tabitha’s right arm, remove her armor, and start snapping the bones back into place. Even Tabitha couldn't help but grunt in pain, but that meant she was still alive.

I use my knee to hold Tabitha in place as I work fast. Without her armor interfering with my senses, Sense Mana can give me a clear picture of what's wrong with Tabitha's arm.

I was no medical personnel, but even I could tell her right arm was broken in five places and fractured almost everywhere else. So, using Tabitha's sheath and my ripped-up canvas, I force Tabitha’s bones into their proper position using mine as a reference and jerry-rig a splint.

Now for the hard part.

Ignoring Tabitha’s cries of pain when I touch it, I move onto her left arm, which was considerably worse.

First, I pried the remains of Tabitha's shield and her other armor pieces from her arm to understand better what I was working with, and it wasn’t a pretty sight. Pieces of Tabitha’s arm bones were sticking out of her mangled flesh in multiple places. There wasn’t a single intact bone in her entire left arm.

I don't want to, but if my crazy plan doesn't work out, I might have to amputate her left arm after all.

I was confident I could save the right, which was her sword arm, but I refused to give up without trying.

“Please bear with me," I tell Tabitha as I try to do the impossible.

Closing my eyes, I place my hands on Tabitha’s left shoulder. There was no room for mistakes. Activating Magic Threads, I use Inject Mana to force my skill past Tabitha's body's natural defenses. My goal was to stitch Tabitha up from the inside, using my mana to hold everything in place, so I could use the healing potion without chopping off her arm. However, it was easier said than done.

Tabitha’s body didn’t know I was trying to help it, and a woman of Tabitha’s caliber had a strong resistance to foreign mana. So it was complicated to maintain control of my mana as I guided it around her mangled flesh, even more so when I started to try to move things around.

Even though Tabitha was on her deathbed, I had to use my entire body to pin her to the ground as I carried out my risky procedure. It probably felt like I was injecting acid into her veins; combine that with the pain she was already feeling, and it's no wonder she was trying to throw me off.

I started at her shoulder, where the bone fragments were the biggest. Again, I need to use my skeletal system as a cheat sheet, but with the added difficulty of piecing dozens of bone fragments together. The only reason I knew which pieces went where was because I was pulling a page from my crafting book and treating the bones as if they were ingots I needed to link together.

Like metal, Tabitha’s bones had a natural structure to them, and because I was used to looking at microscopic structures and knew what to look for, I was better able to match them to where they should go.

I wish I could take my time, but again, I was on the clock. It had only been a few minutes since we fell down here, and I have had to solve one problem after another. I might have been able to reduce the amount of pain Tabitha was experiencing if I had more time to work, but I had to forgo that to finish before her armor activated.

My weird surgery takes me an agonizing three minutes from start to finish. But, in that time, I was able to organize and connect all of Tabitha’s bone fragments. I also tried to stitch up her muscles and ligaments to the best of my ability, but by the time I reached that point, my mana was hovering around 10%.

If I didn’t have Tabitha’s mana potion, there was no way I would’ve been able to pull off what I did. I wanted to collapse but needed to administer the healing potion first.

I don’t know at what point it happened, I was too engrossed in controlling my mana, but Tabitha passed out due to the excruciating amount of pain, so this time, it was much easier to force her to drink the second potion than it was the first. I just needed to tilt her head back and pore the potion directly into her mouth, and she swallowed it unconsciously.

And after that, I finally collapsed backward onto my ass and sighed deeply. So much happened in such a short time, leaving me both physically and mentally drained.

My Health was hovering around 40% from the poison, but that was nothing compared to my low mana. Plus, using all my skills to break into the ruins stressed my stamina, so I was tired in almost every conceivable way.

Oh well, since Tabitha’s armor didn’t activate, I’m guessing I succeeded in saving her life. It was still a coin toss if her arms could heal properly, but I did everything I could. I had no idea when she would wake up, but until then, I’ll watch over her. And when she finally comes to, whether her arms work or not, we'll devise a way to get out of here together.

Or die trying.

**********

3,100 words.

Happy early easter, everybody; I hope you enjoyed the chapter.

Please tell me your thoughts below; was this how you saw everything playing out? Well, you better hold on to your butts because it isn't over yet.

I’ll probably be chilling with family most of tomorrow, but I plan on having another chapter ready sometime late Monday. See you then, and as always, stay safe.