“Quick, toss me a coag pill!” Jogujo shouted.

Alda was rummaging through the toolbox, a frustrated look on her face. “I can’t! Solera, you do it.”

Solera looked around frantically for the pill Jogujo wanted. They had travelled to this underground cavern just the night before, and had set up very hastily, so it was still extremely difficult to find anything.

He saw it, the red box that contained blood coagulating pills. In his rush, Solera fumbled with it for several seconds before throwing a pill over Jogujo’s head. Jogujo glared at him. His face red, Solera ran up and handed Jogujo another pill before gripping the regular’s hand again.

They had traveled away from the main camp to this cavern several kilometers east of Fortress Hickory in preparation for a large battle today. Originally, Solera had thought the main camp was a mere thirty kilometers away from the fortress, but it turned out that was just the westernmost tunnel system, which is where they were currently.

“This place is a clusterfuck.” Alda grumbled as she came over with a scalpel borrowed from one of the many other doctors in the cavern. It was jam-packed with medic teams like Solera’s and the wounded they were trying to save. Moans of agony filled the cavern, and every minute brought in a new wave of wounded.

Over the course of the last hour, Solera’s team had treated around twenty people. Already, Solera’s Lake was nearly out of the healing power that he had drawn up from a whole night’s worth of the power crystal’s charge.

Solera desperately wanted to know just how bad the fighting was out there, but there was no time and too many people to treat. Already, Alda was bringing in a new injured.

Solera looked at the soldier, a white-haired man who had lost an arm. He recognized this man; it was Scarlet.

“Heavens, what happened to that arm?” Jogujo gasped in shock. Solera looked at what used to be Scarlet’s arm. Jagged tears of flesh hung loosely off a snapped bone which ended right after where the forearm should have begun. Little lights of power shined out of the wound as Scarlet channelled power into the arm to curtail the blood flow.

“Tiger. We got ambushed in one of the basins near Hickory.” Scarlet said, his face grim. His eyes flickered past Solera. “Wait. How long will this take? You just need to put in a seed and stitch it up, right?”

“Yes. Should take around four minutes.” Jogujo motioned to Alda, who began to forage through the pile of supplies for a regrowth seed.

“Let him go first, then.” Scarlet tilted his head towards Solera. After a moment of confusion, Solera turned around. Behind him was a regular whose stomach area had been savaged in a manner similar to Scarlet. Green blood and brown pus poured out of the wound. Lacerations ran all along the regular’s limbs, and a trench had been carved down the middle of its body. Its eyes looked dim, as if it was about to faint.

“This…” Jogujo hesitated.

“His injury is more serious. He should be treated before me.” Scarlet said firmly as he struggled to get off the gurney. Solera listened in shock. Wasn’t Scarlet one of the soldiers that were prejudiced against monsters? He remembered clearly that confrontation between the humans and regulars, shortly after the first summoning. This seemed totally out of character.

“I don’t know if I can save it. Its injury is too severe.” Jogujo shook his head. “Any healforce pills we give it would take too long to work, and nobody can channel enough.”

“Hey, this is a life in front of you!” Scarlet shouted, his face turning the same shade of red it had been when he was arguing with the regulars. “I fought in the basin with it! I had my doubts about these monsters, but they aren’t bad at all! If you treat me instead of him because I’m human and he’s not, then you’re… you’re a motherfucker!”

Solera looked at the regular. It looked to be on the verge of death, and had an expression of resignation on its insect-like face. Solera’s eyes flickered to the power crystal around his wrists. After a moment of hesitation, he made up his mind.

Solera gripped the regular’s arms and channeled all the remaining verdant power into it. Jogujo shielded his eyes from the brilliant green glow, a look of astonishment on his face.

“Solera… how?” He gasped, setting his knife down onto the gurney. “Converting that much power into healforce… even I can’t do that!”

Beads of sweat poured down Solera’s forehead. He stared into the regular’s bulbous eyes. Some life seemed to have returned to them, although he didn’t know enough to be sure. His channels screamed from the exertion of transmitting so much power, and in his head, a small throbbing pain emerged.

The brilliant light emerging from the regular’s wounds began to dim as the last of the verdant power in Solera’s Lake drained away. He started to panic. What if he didn’t have enough power to heal this regular? Could his channels even take the strain of pouring out so much power? He had never channeled so much before, how could he have done something so reckless?

Solera let go of the regular and fell onto the ground. His knees were trembling, and pain shot coursed through all his channels. But what he looked at was not himself, but at the regular’s injuries.

“Holy Sky.” Alda breathed, running towards the regular. “It still needs some more treatment, but you brought it back from the verge of death, Solera. Everyone here just saw what you did.”

Solera realized, with shock, that the cavern had, more or less, fallen silent. Every single person had seen the flashing lights of Solera’s healing and stopped whatever they were doing. Even the countless masses of wounded had fallen silent.

Scarlet walked up to Solera and patted him on the shoulder with his stump, smattering Solera’s face with a bit of his blood. “Nice job. I’m no medic, but even I can tell that was amazing. What kind of training did you do to be such a good channeler?”

Solera tried to smile, but his everything hurt too much. The truth was that Solera was horrible at channeling. He had no idea how to convert power into healforce, and his actual power purity was not too high, either. It was all due to the power crystal, but he couldn’t tell them that. What if they took it away? How would he be able to return the crystal to Vinoh and help his father cure himself of the Curse that afflicted him? His action had been too impulsive, but it had saved a life. Solera really didn’t know what to do or how to feel about the situation.

Scarlet’s eyes flickered. “Hey! He looks like he overexerted himself, someone give him a hand!” He waved his stump around at Solera to emphasize his point. He looked back at Solera, a smile on his face. “You did good, alright? Saving someone like that, really good work!”

Scarlet was about to say more, but Jogujo grabbed him and steered him back onto the gurney. Solera breathed a sigh of relief. It looked like he was saved from answering any uncomfortable questions. Alda came over to help him up.

“Take this power replenishing pill.” Alda inserted it into Solera’s mouth along with a bit of water. “You really overexerted your channels. That’s incredibly dangerous, Solera. If your channels broke, you would’ve died! Painfully,” she added as an afterthought.

Solera kept his silence awkwardly. His channels were screaming with pain, but it wasn’t that painful. She was probably overemphasizing the danger, like Chianti with battles.

“Hey! Hey you!” A voice on the other side of the cavern called out. Solera turned his head to look at the speaker. It was a woman, her finger pointing straight at Solera. “Save me too! You can save me, right?”

Solera stared in shock. Another man shouted out at him. Immediately, the cavern was filled with the yells of others too far gone to be treated. Solera could see the pain and desperation in their eyes. He could hear it in their pleas. He trembled.

“You save that monster, but you won’t save me?” The woman screeched. “Fuck you! I’m dying, I’m going to die!”

“Ughhh.” Alda groaned. She lifted Solera up and carried him into a chair. “You’re getting out of here. Who knows what might happen if you stay.”

Solera didn’t protest. He was still in shock that his action could cause such a reaction. Scarlet called out to him as he left, but Solera couldn’t understand his words amidst the racket.

“I hate to say this.” Alda said she wheeled him out of the cavern. “But you can’t be impulsive about saving a person’s life. As a medic, there are just too many. I know you used some kind of technique to convert your Lake into power that can be quickly converted into healforce. You have to be more stingy with it. I don’t want to sound cold, but you can save more lives if you ration your power.”

Solera said nothing, looking angrily off at the dark tunnel walls. He had just saved a life. Why was everyone being so negative? Was that what he deserved for his actions?

Alda seemed to notice Solera’s displeasure. She sighed, ruffling her hands through her hair. “I want to make sure you know that above all, you did good. We need more medics like you here, truthfully speaking. I’ll load you up on one of the reindeer to take you back to the main camp, where you can rest up.”

“Okay.” Solera mumbled. After several more minutes of walking, Alda had taken Solera aboveground to one of the reindeer stations. He was quickly put onto a reindeer, which began galloping eastwards towards the main camp.

The ride would be a long one. Solera sat atop the saddle as the trees and shrubbery flashed by, brooding to himself. He shouldn’t have been angry there. If he was about to die, he also would have done almost anything for a chance to live. It was obvious that Solera was powerless by then, but maybe that wasn’t so obvious to someone nearing death. And Alda was only giving advice on how better to spend his power. Really, it wasn’t something to get so worked up about.

More importantly, Solera knew he had to improve his channels if he wanted to continue as a medic. What good was all the healforce the power crystal provided if he didn’t have channels strong enough to transmit it? Once he arrived back, he would have to find a good circulation mantra to practice with. Before, Solera had disdained spending time and effort on his channels in favor of training his sword skills, but those weren’t of much use in his current situation. Also, people were going to think he was a good channeler or something. If he didn’t know anything about it, they would suspect him and take his power crystal away and he would never be able to give it back to Vinoh and Vinoh would die. Yes, he would absolutely have to read up more on channeling when he got back.

Solera began to doze off. Despite the unevenness of the terrain, the reindeer moved smoothly. Its rhythm actually helped him fall asleep. When he awoke, the two fortresses of the main camp could be seen only a few kilometers away. It was nearly dusk, which meant he had been on the reindeer for the entire day.

He rubbed his eyes in disbelief. Surely he hadn’t been that tired. Was it the channeling that had made him so drowsy? No, it was probably from draining all that power from his Lake. Whatever it was, the pain in his channels had subsided to a dull throb, something that could easily be ignored.

The reindeer trotted up to the fortress a quarter of an hour later, allowing Solera to dismount. He spent several minutes stretching before climbing a rope up onto the fortress. He would go back to his room and sleep some more before taking a visit to the underground library for a circulation mantra.

He stopped, then turned around and walked back to the branch. Nothing was stopping him from getting a circulation mantra right now, so why wait?