“We’re going back now,” Lasi announced.

“Understood,” Jasmine said. “Shields up!”

I acquiesced, Soren and Sunsbridge being a little slower to do so. I watched as their spells went up. Soren was a Sanyin oath, and it showed in her spell, a dozen smaller shields interlinking to connect a single full Ceretian shield. Sunsbridge, on the other hand, was an Aedi oath, and his spell was assisted by a glowing bracer at his wrist, perfectly circular and smooth.

They were both ML 2, but apparently they had only done relatively soft odd jobs because neither of them seemed terribly suited towards combat. Sunsbridge hadn’t complained much yet, but the few times I’d taken note of him he’d either been startled or swearing, unfamiliar with combat situations. Soren, on the other hand, was a girl after my own heart with her opportunistic mindset, but simply had a deficit in her knowledge on how to kill her targets.

The former lacked mindset, the latter skills. It was a shame, really, when with some time and training they could have been genuine forces to reckon with. Aedi oathholders weren’t usually suited to the frontline, but the ones that sought it were dangerous, and Sanyin was a strong deity while also being an uncommon god to have an oath to.

“Incoming!” Lasi shouted, the sound shaking me out of my thoughts. “Front and left side!”

He took the front, a snap of his fingers creating a burst of lightning that blasted apart vines as thick as my arm in instants.

The left side was Soren, now, and she was slow to react. A red flower bloomed out of a crack, each petal larger around than my face was, and from the golden pistil in its center came dark brown seeds, shot forth like so many bullets. Soren hadn’t even begun casting when the seed-bullets started hitting her shield. Through some stroke of godly provenance, she was defensively perfect for dealing with this. Even though the seedshot was breaking through her shield nigh effortlessly, they were slowed enough by the hit to not break her skin and her spell was not just one shield but many, a section going down with each hit instead of the whole spell.

Defensive utility or no, she wasn’t ready to attack back. I took a second to shape a magic missile, picturing its target as the center of the flower’s pistil. I could tell the spell’s frame had been shaky even as I cast it, the magic slipping through my fingers, and the shot went wide, hitting a petal instead. I saw Lukas fire what was probably a classic fireball, a sphere of force and heat spiraling forth at breakneck speed, and that landed true. A strike to the center and the flower died even as it finished breaking Soren’s shield apart.

“You can’t be passive like that!” Lukas shouted. “Even the offshoots will kill you if you’re not paying attention!”

“Kill your targets,” Lasi said, voice stern but gentle. “Do not hesitate.”

“Y-yeah,” Soren said. “Gotcha. Thank you, Lukas.”

“Head in the game, Ashley,” Jasmine said. “Save your thanks for later.”

Soren didn’t reply again, instead casting another set of Ceretian shields. She’d recovered fairly quickly from her last spell being broken, all things considered. Maybe she’d actually deserved making it to ML 2.

We were almost back to the hill that we’d been on when the fight had started. It was already apparent that the situation had changed, and it hadn’t been for the better. The cracks were wider and more numerous, and the plants I saw coming from them were more varied in size, color, and effect. Where there had once been a clock tower, there was now a massive branching tree, the ruins of a once-proud building adorning its branches. The clock, I noticed, had been integrated into the thick trunk of the tree, broken machinery glaring down at the battlefield.

The central tree was absolutely teeming with the primordial’s influence, new offshoots appearing from its dense leaves with every second. I could no longer see the blue knight’s party, the four of them hidden by the almost tumorous plant growths, but the telltale sound and sight of magical explosions within the developing mess told me that they were still alive.

Good. The blue knight was a long-time adventurer, if this was the same blue knight I remembered. Not the most powerful, not by a long shot, but they’d been attending crisis events like this one for decades now, parties changing but their drive to adventure remaining constant. They had been around long enough that their name was known throughout the kingdom, and it was one that I had known and looked up to as a child in nobility. If they went down it would likely spell doom for the rest of us.

“We’re staying away from the center,” Lasi said after taking a moment to assess the situation. “I believe that this primordial is not going to be mobile, but that’s an assumption and not one you should rely on. Still, if we assume that—“

“Then we can save people on its outskirts, since those are compromised to a lesser extent,” Jasmine finished. “And that gives us room to operate within.”

“Precisely,” the professor said. “Let us not waste time.”

He took off, and we followed.

The number of downed adventurers had increased greatly. It had been, what, ten minutes? Maybe even less than that. Ten minutes maximum since the plant primordial had appeared and already at least thirty or forty of us were gone, injured if not dead. A lot of the bodies I could see could’ve been students, their equipment shoddy and their experience incomplete. Around the outskirts of the village, away from the town proper but still closer to it than we were by a significant margin, there was a veritable minefield of prone, unmoving forms. Some of them were clearly already dead, having been severed into multiple pieces or partially devoured by one of the primordial’s offshoots. The chaff of the adventurers, filtered out in a matter of minutes.

There were still more standing than there were downed, but I wasn’t sure whether that was because we had more fighting bodies than dead or if it was because the true number of dead and downed was significantly higher, obscured by what I had observed earlier— the primordial’s propensity to wholly absorb people into the earth, leaving behind nothing but a trace of fine red mist.

“Those fighting are on the stronger end of the adventurers drafted here,” Lasi said, voice cold and analytical. “Only I will be anything more than a hindrance if we seek to help them.”

“Wow, thanks,” Sunsbridge said.

“It’s true,” Lukas told him.

“Follow me, as you have been doing,” Lasi said. “Jasmine. You still have the healer’s sense, yes?”

Jasmine was just a little ahead of me in our formation so I couldn’t see her face, but the way she cocked her head told me she frowned at that. “It’s been a long time since I used that in a combat situation successfully. Even if it’s still there, it’s weak and it’s something that I’ll need to focus all my attention on.”

“That’s fine,” Lasi said. “I have your front, and Lily should be able to protect your flank.”

“I have you,” I said, wincing at how awkward my choice of words was even as they left my mouth.

“What even is healer’s sense?” Sunsbridge asked. “I haven’t spoken to many Nacea oathholders.”

“I should be able to tell who on this battlefield is saveable and who is better off left behind,” Jasmine grimaced. “It’s a cold way to look at things, and I’d rather we try to save every person here, but I know my limits. You’ll have to defend me while I concentrate on it.”

That magic… It’d been a point of contention in my mind when Lasi had brought it up, but now that she was talking about it again I recalled very clearly learning that Nacea oathholders generally gained the healer’s sense after they reached a certain class, and then it was instinctive. It was, if I remembered correctly, a rather high class. Now wasn’t the time to question it, but I found myself doing it in my mind anyway.

I’d thought earlier that perhaps Lasi had been referring to a different “healer’s sense,” a weaker level version that required a full spell that included material components, but the way she was talking about it indicated that she had likely had the full healer’s sense before her oath had suffered damage.

How powerful had Jasmine been before her crisis? How much service had she done for Nacea?

Whatever the case, now was decidedly not the time to seek answers to those questions. I recast my Ceretian shield, ensuring that it would probably take at least one hit, and I readied a ball of unstructured magic. In my right hand, I held the still-unused frost dagger. In a pinch, I might be able to break through shielding with my magic and kill my target with the remaining magical effect given to the blade.

I glanced towards Jasmine. She had clasped both her gloved hands over pink silk at her chest, her eyes gently shut. The blonde noble evoked the image of a priest or cleric, as if she was meditating or praying. She looked… not relaxed, but she had a peaceful composure to her. It was a graceful sight, and I had to force myself to tear my eyes away.

There was, after all, an active battlefield that needed tending to. A moment of respite, granted by the luck of the draw, did not mean we were safe just yet.

A few meters ahead of us, I saw a series of flowers bloom aimlessly out of a crack. I threw my unstructured magic even as Lasi released a wave of liquid flame. His spell hit the flowers first, sticking to them like glue, and they began to burn, but it was slow. Far slower than it should have been, given Lasi’s exceptional class.

My magic connected a second later, and it was just as effective as it had been before, returning both flame and flower to the void.

“Shit,” the professor said, the curse sounding so foreign from him that I had to pay attention to his words. “The primordial is learning, and it is passing on its growth to its offshoots. It must have been greatly harmed by fire, because that offshoot was resistant to fire.”

Fire, not magic. That explained why my comparatively unimpressive power had blasted through it when Lasi’s spell had been slowed dramatically.

“Is it at risk of gaining a magic resistance?” I asked. “Because if it is, I’m going to be rather useless soon.”

“It is,” Lasi admitted, “But it takes time. The primordials themselves often fail to understand the true depths of their power,and as such take a while to—“

A bush sprouted out from a crack, fully formed, and Lasi threw a firebolt, the advanced version of the classic fireball travelling at blazing speeds. A look at him confirmed that he was also holding a sphere of lightning in his hands, ready to follow up.

This time, the flame devoured the plant hungrily, burning it down till embers in the singed grass were all that remained.

“—establish changes,” Lasi concluded. “Their potential is frightening, but the last time a primordial developed a heavy resistance to magic wholesale was eighty years ago.”

“And what happened then?” Soren asked.

“A third of Kokor was destroyed, and the Great Southern Chasm was formed,” Lasi said blandly. “But that is besides the point. That it is rare is all you should be focused on right now.”

“That’s not very reassuring,” Sunsbridge said.

“It’s not meant to be,” Lukas said. “All we can do is hope the blue knight and their party delay the primordial for long enough to get the big guns in without us dying first.”

“That should be doable,” Soren said confidently. “We have Professor Lasi with us.”

“Do not rely on me,” Lasi said. “I can protect you from the weaker offshoots, but I am still only human and cannot block every hit from hitting you.”

“That pair is injured and able to be healed,” Jasmine said, pointing at two individuals draped in robes and painted with blood, lying next to a pile of wilted flowers. “And it looks like the offshoot there is inactive as well.”

We started making our way to them, carefully picking our way through the domain of the offshoots. Even as we cut down a fireproof vine or two, I could hear blood-chilling screams further into the village. I chanced a look, catching a house crumbling under the weight of a dozen massive mushrooms, then looked back. The people still fighting there were those strong enough to hold their own against the primordial, and there was no point ruminating on whether or not we could save them when we were not equipped for it. As far as I could tell, the difficulty in fighting the primordial scaled up exponentially as one got closer to it, so even a minor miscalculation in position— say, one caused by us searching for downed adventurers to heal— could result in the quick and gruesome deaths of an entire party.

“Shields down in ten seconds,” Lasi said. “My barrier will be up in five.”

I saw the points of bright magic again, and looked over to Jasmine, who was already on the ground healing the adventurers. This pair had been stabbed, it looked like, a hundred dagger wounds piercing every part of their bodies.

Jasmine had them up in under a minute.

“What class are you?” I asked, once Jasmine had finished giving her spiel about the fragility of her healing. “I want to know how difficult this region of the primordial influence is.”

“Four,” one of them responded. “ML 3.”

Even after advancing only a hundred meters or so, we were already in an area where Soren and Sunsbridge would likely be utterly useless.

“We should retreat,” Lukas advised. “Ashley and Grant aren’t strong enough yet, we’ll want to fall back some.”

“We can’t heal more people when we have two liabilities with us” I said, a little more bluntly than Lukas.

“This is true,” Lasi said, ignoring the cries of indignation from our liabilities. “The primordial’s influence appears to be gradually increasing in danger as well. Let us increase our distance from the central clock tower.”

“Sounds like a plan to me,” Jasmine said. “Can you two make it out on your own? You need professional healing.”

“We killed the offshoot here,” one of them said. “It just happened to get us at the same time. We’ll be alright if we hurry.”

“We’ll follow them for one hundred and fifty meters,” Lasi said. “That should be a decent safe distance.”

He counted down from ten, and he brought his bubble of force down, the rest of us throwing up Ceretian shields simultaneously.

We ran, the group a little uncoordinated with the addition of two strangers but still coherent, never losing a member.

We had almost made it to the area where the cracks ended when a crushing pressure filled the air, the presence almost physically tangible.

“The primordial is doing something!” Professor Lasi yelled, signalling for our entire group to halt. “Prepare for—“

The grass beneath us rustled, but the wind had died out a long time ago.

I realized what it was a moment too late to warn anyone, opting instead to prepare and cast magic at my feet.

“The grass!” someone shouted. “It is the grass!”

The ground beneath us screamed, and all hell broke loose.