Derek was exhausted. The sun was just barely above the southwestern horizon. He was moving from man to man in the temporary field hospital they had set up in the Smuggler’s Cove they had found. The hours since they began their push down the tunnels had been a harrowing experience. Now Derek was wringing out every bit of mana he had to assist the recovery of the wounded guards. The grateful faces of the men and women around him a testament to how many of their comrades he had preserved.

Just a few hours earlier they had been in high spirits after clearing out the warehouse with no true casualties. The man Derek had healed was already recovered and back with his squadmates when the guards that had taken the warehouse itself had joined them in the basement. Guard Captain Drake surveyed the room and the slain assassins before ordering the exploration of the tunnels.

One of the guard squads stayed behind to secure the warehouse while Drake led the rest down the tunnels. The scouts moved first, searching for traps and ambushes. After that was an elite squad in service to the port authority followed by the leadership of the various guard forces involved in the operation. The remaining guards followed behind, working together as if they had done this several times before. This line up allowed for the elite guardsmen and the tiered leaders to aggressively suppress any opposition until the weight of the rest of the guard units could be brought to bear.

Derek and his grandfather fell in behind the Captain himself. Their progress was rapid as the scouts knew their jobs well. They passed several disarmed traps and disabled sentries. Half an hour later their luck ran out as the sounds of a skirmish and flashes of light indicated that the scouts had come into conflict with someone up ahead. The guards around him picked up their pace, hustling to join the conflict as quickly as possible so as to not lose the initiative.

Derek cast his Righteous Blessing on himself, his grandfather and the nearest few leaders as he followed at a quick jog. He came around the last bend to find the room in chaos. The room turned out to be a mixture of warehouse and barracks. It seemed that the scouts had been detected while entering and had been forced into cover to exchange ranged fire with the assassins and sailors in the room. Anyone foolish enough to try to approach across the no man’s land would be targeted by the ranged attacks of their opponents.

This stalemate had ended abruptly when the elite guardsmen and squad leaders had come pouring into the room. A few of the guards had fallen but the ferocity of their charge had carried them quickly across the room and into melee range with the defenders. The fight had swung entirely in the guards’ favor so Derek turned to assisting the downed guards.

The first man he ran to had been unlucky. An arrow to the eye had taken the man’s life instantly so Derek ran on to the next. This guardswoman had taken four arrows to places unprotected by her partial armor. Derek, first Delved her before using a low tier water spell to soothe her nerves. He then withdrew the arrows with the assistance of his magic and sprites. Finally he cast three rounds of low tier Purify and Holy Light into his patient before marking her injuries as healed on her breastplate.

He gave her a comforting pat on the shoulder before running onto the next wounded guardsman. This one had only taken a single arrow, but it had gone completely through the knee. Derek once more followed his procedure of Delving, anesthetizing, removing the arrow, then Purifying and healing.

This guy had taken less overall damage and when he indicated his desire to rejoin his friends on the line Derek nodded, before removing the anesthetic and pumping a direct blast of earth and fire mana into his system to give him a temporary energy boost. These kinds of direct applications of mana were not quite spells. The mana expenditure to use these were less efficient than actual spells but could grant the intended effect on the fly as long as the caster understood what they were doing.

Finished healing the man, Derek patted his helmet and gave him a thumbs up before running onto the next downed guardsman. There was already a healer there. This guy was tier zero like most of the other guards but he had spent time and energy improving his ability to cast water and earth mana. This allowed him to stabilize his injured comrades before getting them to a field hospital. The cost of raising elite troops was only marginally less expensive than raising people to tier one. No leader worth his position would willingly send them into combat without some form of healer support.

Dropping down next to the man, Derek felt a shudder from his aegis as a pair of arrows bounced off of it. From its angle he couldn’t tell if it had targeted him, the healer, or had just been a wild shot. Derek looked down to see that the guard on the ground had been burnt by a fire attack of some sorts. He then looked up at the healer to see a woman just a decade older than him. He spoke up, “Sister, what’s his status?”

She glanced up from her patient, not recognizing him but her eyes soon focused on his holy symbol. The symbols of the Hearth and Sun were both indicators of healing ability. Some tension drained from her seeing this, “He is in critical condition with burns across fifty percent of his upper body. His armor has fused to his chest and his breathing is shallow and heart rate is weak. I have just now put him to sleep to start work on his injuries.”

Derek nodded before glancing around to see that the fight had progressed further into the room. He first cast Sanctuary where he was, providing a physical boost to all of the guards in the area, while a gentle rain of holy mana fell on all in the area. He then began to slowly use earth and fire based mana to pull the armor from the man with the assistance of his sprites.

The Sanctuary had almost doubled the man’s body attribute, granting him a robustness that would allow him to overcome the damage inflicted by removing the fused metal of his armor. Derek was able to remove the armor and the Sanctuary started healing the man’s wounds immediately. He Delved the man quickly to confirm his status then got up to move to the next wounded person.

The healers were quick to make use of the Sanctuary Derek provided. The static area of effect of the spell allowed them to move the wounded into its radius and save mana on healing. Within minutes the fighting remaining injured had been healed and several of them had cycled back to the front to join their comrades.

Derek followed the sounds of the fighting, stopping every once in a while to help wounded guards he found. At the next bend in the corridor he found an unfortunate scout who had been slain when he missed a trap, spikes pinning him gruesomely to the wall. Nearby Derek found another scout who had suffered from a blade trap. The man was holding desperately to his stomach to hold the contents in.

Running up, Derek quickly delved the man. The man’s injuries were severe. Aside from the near disemboweling he had suffered, he was also suffering from poison and some other impurities in his system. Worse, Derek could tell that the blood loss was extreme. Derek immediately got to work, adding earth element to the water element he normally used. This bolstered the man and strengthened him while the water element reduced his pain. Derek then cast a Healing Light and Purify spell and checked again.

The man was still incredibly weak, so Derek grabbed a potion out of his storage space and fed it to the man. This was no healing potion or stamina potion, but a potion with raw nutrients that would provide his body with the necessary fuel to keep healing itself. If Derek hadn’t cast so much already that day he could have been able to craft a spell to do this, but as of now he was almost tapped and the potion would be sufficient for his needs. Sensing the effects of the potion flooding the man, Derek cast another Healing Light to help it along, before using the nearby blood to mark the man healed. Finished, he hurried down the remaining corridor before entering what looked like the first floor of another building.

There were a few more wounded guards here but he was waved on by the healers supporting them. Derek rushed out of the front door to see a cove in front of him. Derek glanced around to see more guards on the ground but he also noticed a ship escaping out of the cove. Frustrated, Derek cursed, “Damn, they got away.”

A heavy hand landed on his shoulder. He heard his grandfather’s voice from beside him, “Only a few made it to that vessel. Most will be staying here.”

Realization crossed Derek’s mind as he looked around. He saw that the guards had captured three other vessels and the rest of the fighting was dying down on the beaches, docks and in the buildings of the cove. Even remembering his efforts to preserve the guards that had been wounded, he was reminded of the shadows nearby, dead or dying sailors and assassins. For every wounded guard he had seen several of their opponents on the ground. Even now, as the remaining opponents were being taken down, the fight was still largely in the guards’ favor.

Derek turned to see the healer he had worked with before bringing wounded towards a temporary field hospital one of the guard Mages had set up. Seeing this, Derek nodded to his grandfather before running off to join her. The field hospital turned out to be merely a collection of blankets laid out to accept the wounded.

Derek’s first action upon arriving was to cast a Sanctuary on the area, which came close to using the last of his mana. He felt his knees go weak before he caught himself and withdrew another mana potion to drink. He tasted the refreshing mango berry flavor before he felt the revitalizing energy pour into his mana pool. Refreshed, he moved to the nearest bed and began healing wounded guards.

Hours later as the sun was setting, the last of the wounded was brought into the field hospital. The other healers had used up all their mana at this point and could only help with mundane tasks. Derek wrung out one more round of Delving, anesthetizing, Purifying, and healing before sitting down heavily on the chair that had been brought for him. He looked around at the others, and they were all spent, especially him and the Mage who had set up the field hospital.

Derek looked around and saw that new groups of guards were arriving from the tunnel as well as a few ships belonging to the city’s navy. The place was soon teaming with fresh guards and sailors to replace those that had fought here. After a while, Derek saw a man in a silver breastplate and blue and green doublet come off of one of the ships. This man had a distinct golden anchor on his breastplate that denoted some high position.

Derek watched as the officers of the various guard forces in the cove gathered around the man and led him around the cove. Finally, they brought him up to the field hospital where the guards that had been most badly hurt and the healers who had tended them were still recuperating. Seeing the man approach, the various healers all got up to meet him. Derek didn’t want to seem rude so he did the same. The man was a force of personality, greeting the healers and the wounded guards who had gotten up to meet him.

When he finally came to Derek, his eyes lit up, “So young man, my men say that they have you to thank that so many of them survived this fight. If I hadn’t already heard from Captain Drake here that you were a student at our school, I would be trying to snatch you up to come work for my Port Authority. As it is, I will have to get my son to pressure you to make the right decision when you graduate, hahaha.”

Derek looked confused, “Your son?”

The man laughed at Derek, “Of course, my son, Karl Windreach, the Storm Knight. I am sure you heard of him.”