《A Boy’s Simple Ambition》Chapter 91
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After carefully looking over Ethan's wounds and checking vitals at least twice, Rainelle decided that he was far away enough from death that they could perform the procedure with acceptable risks. If the situation had been different then maybe they may would have had the luxury of waiting longer, however, this was a field hospital related to a swarm battle. Unfortunately there was also a significant lack of information about such situations and even if they were acting mostly on conjecture, the fused presence of a monster on a mortal caused Rainelle and her assistants too much concern for the boy's well-being to leave it.
"Use half the normal dose of the Dream Trap root to help ensure the pain it mitigated."
"Ma'am?"
"He is still too weak for a full dose. It may kill him. He should be able to handle a half dose, and if you include the loss of blood and Nel' Ina poisoning, he hopefully won't feel too much pain from the procedure."
"So we are removing the arm?"
"Yes, there are too many unknowns. While he will lose part of another limb we will know for sure that he won't be in danger from fused monster parts."
For a split second the academic part of her mind pointed out that if they left the arm alone they would be able to gather important information in a new field of study. To say that part of her mind was suddenly, and violently, thrashed about by the remaining, more emotional and humane, parts of her mind would be an understatement. The assault was so intense she actually winced before shaking her head to clear her thoughts. One of the assistants moved to place a large glass water pipe next to the boy's head, the inside already working on burning a half dose of Dream Trap as instructed. A cup with a heavy leather tube attached to its bottom on one end and the top of the pipe on the other was carefully placed over his mouth and nose, forcing him to breath in the vapors.
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The Dream Trap root came from an afflicted plant animal that lulled their prey into a dream state and then entangled them with their vines to hold them down as they were slowly devoured. Normally Dream Traps were only large enough to target smaller creatures but upon Affliction they could grow in size to take down large monsters. If the dose, determined by the individual's size, was controlled correctly it could be used to force someone into a dream state where they didn't feel any pain. It was used for various purposes, recreational and professional, and was actually the incense used to put the kidnapped children to sleep.
After letting the boy breath in the vapor for several minutes the one handling the water pipe carefully pressed a pin against the boy's neck, pushing it down until right before it broke skin. Seeing that he didn't so much as flinch she looked up at Rainelle with a nod before returning the pin to the tray next to her.
"It seems he is consumed by the Dream Trap, we should be good after a few more moments."
It was late afternoon, to the backdrop of explosions growing more distant by the hour, that Rainelle finally stepped back from the boy's heavily bandaged stump. She had removed the arm just above where the fusion between his body and the monster, which was right below his elbow. Taking a deep breath she removed her gloves and moved toward the front of the tent while the others began to clean up and continue healing him. Though she was exhausted she nodded with a weak smile to those that offered her congratulations and praise on a successful amputation. Looking over her shoulder she noted they were starting to wrap up the arm so that it could be transported and researched later. She then stepped out through the flap and took a deep breath of the, for the most part, clean air around her.
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Making her way over to the resources tent she selected a few sandwiches and placed them on a wooden plate before looking to the cups. Instead of taking one and filling it she instead simply picked up an entire pitcher of water and walked away to sit down at one of the tables. As she ate in silence she watched as several combatants from the Cloudcrest forces were led to one of the other tents that had been erected. At least she assumed they were Cloudcrest as only a select number of scouts and their medical group had been deployed to the front lines from Ravenspire. Of course that wasn't because Ravenspire didn't care, far from it, they just didn't have a realistic and logical means of moving their troops down the vertical face of the plateau so they focused on siege support.
While some of the adventurers brought to the medical tents looked pale from exhaustion, and were definitely beat up, none of them seemed to have any life threatening injuries so she was able to overcome her urge to go help as she wouldn't be needed. She knew that she needed to eat and rest a little bit for if she collapsed then she wouldn't be able to help anyone and would become a burden on the others. She had just polished off the water in the pitcher after finishing her last sandwich when a commotion broke out near edge of the tent. She stood up as several healers rushed toward two armored women that came into their clearing. The taller of the two, though not by much, was supporting the other and basically dragging her along, a bloody hole on the side of her armored stomach immediately telling Rainelle how serious the wound was.
Having since moved to the front of the tent where the boy was now resting she knew she would need to assist in this situation and quickly called the growing group over. Several healers had propped up the wounded woman and began to lead her across the clearing with the second following closely behind, a terrified expression clearly visible on her face. She felt the urge to tell her she needed to remain outside but also knew she would need more information to properly heal her wounded companion and thus stopped herself. Stepping through the flap after everyone entered she called to those still working on the boy.
"Put up curtains, we have a second wounded that requires advance ca..."
She stopped talking because she almost walked into the back of the second armored woman, whom had unexpectedly stopped mid-step just after entering the tent. It took some impressive, though stumbling, footwork to keep from crashing into the knight.
"Excuse me?"
She asked with some level of annoyance while stepping around the woman but immediately quieted upon seeing the look of horror on her face as she stared at the boy. The blood quickly drained from her flushed skin and her hands were shaking ever after coming to rest against her partially opened lips. Tears almost immediately began to poor down her cheeks before the sound of crumbling, and then crashing, armor filled the tent, making several of the healers jump in surprise. Clearly in mortified shock the knight had simply collapsed to her knees in front of the boy's table her gaze now void of clear thought. Rainelle quickly dropped to her side to support her body and called out to her while lightly shaking her. Thought the words were soft she could hear the woman's reply in a flat tone.
"Hey, hey, be careful now, are you ok?"
"...Ethan... I failed you..."
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Sword System Academia
2/17 NOTICE: I'm putting this on hiatus, possibly permanently. I didn't want to spam with an "update chapter", so hopefully here and in the story blurb will get enough eyeballs. There are a couple reasons for ending SSA for now. 1) I wrote the next chapter but wasn't happy with it. I've been less and less satisfied with SSA's quality the more I thought about it. Part of the reason is... 2) I am seriously thinking about trying to publish some novels to help pay the bills, since I don't have my other source of income anymore. I have never asked for anything from SSA readers, no money, not even a review or rating. SSA is written for fun to amuse myself, primarily, and I would kind of feel bad actually charging someone money for something as unserious as that. I don't think it is good enough to ask anything in return. To use an analogy from music, SSA is more like a jam session with a bunch of friends. You're just chiling and having fun playing some music. I mean, if you are Mozart or even Eminem, your jam session is good enough to sell, but for an amateur beginner like myself, haha, no. If I want to publish something, I feel like I need to go the proper route of practice and rehearsals, which might be more similar to a classical concert performance. With SSA, I work from worldbuilding notes and a loose outline, but what you are essentially getting is the first draft with lots of so-called pantsing. Pushing out a web novel like this also means it is very difficult to go back and improve things without breaking everything else downstream. I wanted to try this "jamming" approach, as it was a good way to teach me about another aspect of writing, but to move forward, I think I need to hone my "classical" techniques, which emphasize rewriting, or at least, revising outlines. 3) While I intend to try to make $$$, my actual current goal is to "get gud". I've spent a lot of time recently trying to understand the self-publishing industry, and I'm pretty sure I can make some money by using short-term strategies with my current amateur skill level. But I've seen too many authors come and go/burnout, and really, the only way that I think I can enjoy writing and still make money on a long-term basis is to become a better writer. And the next step for me, which I haven't done much before, is to spend more time on rewriting and outlines. That is pretty much antithetical to the way SSA is developing. I've always been kind of 20/80 plotting/pantsing, but I want to spend a lot more time outlining before I even start writing. SSA jam sessions don't really fit my goal anymore. If you're curious about what's next, read on... Among other regrets, I regret not finishing SSA. It's the first story I've dropped, but then again, it's the first web novel I've attempted, so I suppose that's not a surprise. I don't think traditional web novel formats suit me that well. The whole SSA story I had loosely planned (beyond a first book or major arc) is way too large as well. Big story = good for neverending webnovel with Patreons, bad for penniless and fickle writer like me. I am currently outlining a complete trilogy to another story in great detail. I want the story to end concisely, and I also want the chance to really spend a lot of time on the full outline to spot pacing problems, character issues, lost themes, and so on. I'll still share this story on RR. What I intend to do is finish book 1, flash-publish the whole thing here for a few weeks, then publish on the big Zon. Repeat for books 2 and 3. The upcoming story will be about crafting heroes. The backdrop is an isekai-like setting, where elves will summon humans to their world as heroes, but the whole hero crafting business is still in its infancy. The elven mage researchers are figuring out how to imbue heroes with power, while the heroes are trying to figure out how to use the powers that they gain. Humans are the best hero templates because they are blank and have no intrinsic magic. Or at least that what the elves thought. The human MC has his own secrets... There will be some similarities with litrpgs, but I would call it more a progression fantasy or gamelit story. For example, the stats are very low, at least initially. Say we have a stat called Str. Going from Str = 1 to Str = 2 is a huge deal. Also, going from Dex = 0 to Dex = 1 is an even bigger deal. I guess you could call it a "low-stat litrpg", haha. Also, the heroes won't be gaining stats simply by killing things or leveling up. You can't increase stats arbitrarily, either. There will be rules to how stats can increase, and how they work with each other. The elven mages will be figuring out these rules in order to craft stronger and stronger heroes. Some inspiration will be from cultivation magic systems, but there won't be overt cultivation, at least for now. A theme I really want to explore is the idea of interactions. That includes things like hero crafter vs hero, tactics vs strategy, skill synergies, racial interactions (dwarves, elves, etc), and son. Yeah, so hero crafting. I'm super excited about this project and venturing into publishing. If you want to check out the upcoming story, you can follow my RR author profile to see when it drops here. Finally... THANK YOU TO EVERYONE! I'm very sorry that SSA is stopping, but I hope at least some of you will find the next story at least as enjoyable, if not more. Thanks to all the readers who gave SSA a shot. Big hug or solid fistbump to all of you, whichever you prefer! I hope this message is not a downer but an upper, because I am psyched!! -purlcray -------------- BLURB: Talen, youngest Master of the Koroi, makes his way to the Empire's capital to salvage his clan's fate. 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I took parts from different genres I enjoyed and twisted them into my own creation. There will be an explicit system, both of the litrpg kind and the hard(ish) magic kind, but it is embedded within an academic structure that will develop over the course of the story. This is my attempt to design a unique type of system, the System Academia.
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