"They are back!" a voice called from the car wall to the north of town. It didn't take but a minute for a long wooden ramp to get dropped on the other side of the wall. Apparently I left an impression, I mused to myself.

Trainees and Wild Guards greeted each other as equals, more than one hug going around as the youths chattered with their older counterparts. Family members lingered near the bridge, and as soon as the trainees noticed they rushed to embrace them. Parents, siblings, lovers. The trip had barely taken a week, but for people used to losing family to the Wild it might as well have been an eternity.

Amidst the welcoming committee was Sarah. If it was possible, the orc woman looked even more imposing than she had before. My quick guess was it had something to do with the Q5 my Implant was telling me she had reached. There was an emblem of rough worked metal pinned to her chest high on the sleeve of the rough shirt she wore under her Tanker armor. A hexagon, notched with six small symbols, and a stylized shield in the center. The woman caught my eye and approached Dennis, Sam and I. Out of the arriving expedition, ours was composed of cheers and fist bumps instead of more personal engagements so she had an easy time cutting through the mob.

"Happy to have you back," she said, a thin smile on her face. From what I could tell, it was genuine, but there was definitely something pulling at her.

"No need for a grandiose welcome for us. I'm ready to work," I said, gesturing behind her towards Wildwood proper. She hesitated, but gave a nod in return. Once we were a ways away from the rest of the trainees and the north wall guards, she once again addressed us.

"The Afflicted trainees are awake," she said, cutting right to the point.

"Huh?" the three of us said, snapping out of our surprise. It was easy for me to forget how straightforward Sarah could be when I'd seen her interacting with Daniela and Clara in a more relaxed setting.

"They woke up all throughout the day yesterday. The last one woke up just this morning. Billy, Eric's son."

"Does... does Eric know?" I asked, looking over towards Tec's looming form.

"He was the first I told," Sarah said. "He hasn't left his side. The weird change to Billy's lower body caused a bit of trouble outside of the Tec, and he is currently strapped down. Billy isn't the only one, unfortunately. Most of the others are in various states of... reaction for lack of a better word. We've had to house the Fire and Water trainees in your Crafters Hall thanks to the effects of their bodies. Tec estimates they should stabilize over time, just like they did coming out of their coma, but it has no idea how long that could take. Alan has lost any semblance of coordinated communication, even with Ava's help. We have almost a dozen kids catatonic while suffering supernatural transformations without a single clue of what to do..."

The words had left the woman so quickly I almost wasn't able to follow. With every other thing she said, I could see her stiff shoulders sag. Dennis moved to support her and Sam and I shared a concerned look. We quickly asked her to take us to where Billy was being taken, and she agreed without any hesitation.

"What are we going to do?" I asked Samuel via the comm-plant, not bothering to hide my grimace as I communicated silently with him.

"I don't know... If Alan doesn't have anything for us, and Tec says we need to wait then maybe that's all we need to do?" It wasn't hard to tell that Samuel barely believed himself as he said that.

"We can't just leave them. Maybe if we hadn't pushed Kirby--"

"Don't. Kirby had been doing that and worse to the people of Wildwood for a long time. If we hadn't interfered, then who knows how much worse the Dreg would have squeezed them."

"Do you think he could tell us something?" I asked as we walked off the bridge.

"Kirby? No clue. You said it yourself that he spilled it when we were there. Let's give the trainees a look and we can try to figure out what to do from there," Sam said, giving me a small strained smile. Even with a few doctors and nurses in the mix of Wildwood's survivors and even Lake Weir's, the blonde had become something of a medical expert. Much time spent haranguing Alexis and June had given him a keen sense for small injuries and general anatomy, then his Attunement gave him the means to address that amplified yet again by the assortment of Traits he'd manifested.

We fell into silence as we approached one of the buildings not far from Tec. I could have sworn I saw the crystal glimmer specifically when I looked at it, but my attention was drawn away by the quiet sobs in the room Sarah pulled us into. Beds inspired by Sam's weaved designs lined the either wall. Upon them were the Earth, Life and Death attuned trainees that had survived the Dreg Ritual several weeks back. They all shifted gently, rocking in place or trembling as they twitched transformed features. One of the two life attuned almost seemed to blend into the bed, as the entwined roots that made up almost fifty percent of her body settled into the bed. Her one remaining eye drifted in lazy figure eights, stopping to focus on something for a brief second before resuming it's trackless path.

A gut-wrenching feeling stronger than any mana side effect took hold of me. It was deeper, a sort of primal guilt that argued their state was my fault, just like the death of the other trainees and the Summerfield refugees were also my fault. I don't know how long I stood there, frozen in shock, but when my eyes were able to focus I could see that Eric was shaking me by the shoulders. His grey eyes burned and swirled with the disguised Trait that I knew made him and the other Air attuned Pre-Fall Wild Guard deadly with their ranged weaponry.

"Ronan. Ronan!" The man managed through clenched teeth. I saw the redness on his face and the bloodshot behind the mystical swirl of his eyes. The distraught father. "Please, you have to help him. I listened to you, damn it! I could have been by his side!"

The man thumped me in the chest with the flat of his fist, but I barely felt it. A woman, not much younger than Eric himself and sporting equal marks of grief, moved to pull him away from me. For the first time since walking into the room I was able to see the scattered family and friends of the other trainees. They shared the undertone of grief and worry that Eric, and who I presumed was his wife, exhibited. The only difference was that I had essentially ordered Eric to wait to rescue his child. The tactical benefits of the engagement didn't matter here, not when it came to the price we paid for them, but I tried to form a response.

It didn't work. My jaw muscles refused to work and once again I was reminded that I couldn't do everything. I'd already failed several times on the surface. Maybe not in the sense of the fights we'd survived, but in the impressions I'd left with people. Just because you can come up with a good plan doesn't mean you are a true leader, Ronan. That reminder stung more than I realized. Even when I tried to convince myself that not everyone was going to agree with me, it still came to mind that the origin point for most of the conflicts were my own fault.

Instead of trying to work through my tied tongue, I approached Billy. The youth was condensed mist from the ribs down. Ephemeral outlines of his legs coalesced from the mist every few seconds, but it wasn't long before they dissolved into the chaotic disarray of eddy currents I expected from a visible gas cloud. I saw what Sarah had been hinting at as far as why he'd had to be restrained. His whole body refused to lay flat, and instead hovered an inch above it thanks to a number of ropes across the still solid part of his chest. Billy himself was one of the ones twitching restlessly, eyes open and unable to focus on anything. He was clearly not in a coma anymore, but the boy wasn't all there either.

My own shaky fingers found the boy's arm and I could feel something familiar in the finger-tingly. It was the subtly growing vibrations that happened when I infused materials with Air. It wasn't the incrementally growing mess of a failing Infusion, like with the Insta-meal plastic, but the thrum that preceded the solidification of an Item in it's own right. The growing thrum as I added Infusions until the Item was sated and changed enough according to its nature.

As the thought crossed my mind, every muscle on my body pulled taut like a bowstring ready to fire. Or like how I'd felt moments before my body Attuned to Earth. That was the moment before and triggered almost on their own. A swirl of colors and a searing pain in my head brought me to a pitch black space. For a second, I was scared I'd somehow killed myself by overusing my more mentally-straining Skills, but the blackness slowly settled into a grey-tinged black space.

My eyes naturally followed the grey to where it was most prominent. The color lightened with each foot I tracked until I came upon a small fragmented bubble of white. The center was a tenuous sphere of light while the rest seemed to actively shift and fade to grey as if keeping the darkness away. In the middle of that mess was Billy. The youth looked a bit less catatonic than he did floating above his bed, but the deer-in-headlights look was hard to miss.

When I tried to approach him, my body didn't move at all. Instead of trying to force my body to move, I tried to think of it moving. The similarities between the strange white bubble and the whitespace that the Entities conjured up wasn't hard to miss. So, as if I was a thread of Pith being manipulated, I hovered over the seeming void of darkness to Billy's side.

Now closer, I could see that the darkness was more like a thick oily substance-- more than just the antithesis of the whitespace. There was a hunger to the darkness that became different from the apathetic void further away from Billy. The grey was a warzone, and the darkness was trying to breach the barrier around the youth.

Dreg.

The thought echoed around me and I saw the white sphere grow slightly before shrinking again. The youth within didn't seem to take notice of my presence, instead playing with the sleeves of his shirt and mumbling to himself. I screamed, yelled and positively made a fool of myself trying to draw Billy's attention to no avail. He's trapped by the Dreg.

Once again, the whitespace swelled, pushing out against the oily black. I wasn't sure what triggered the change, but since nothing else seemed to have done the trick I concentrated on the thought that seemed to get a reaction out of the world around me. Dreg. Stop the Dreg! DREG!

My thoughts intensified and the white sphere started to grow larger and larger but the black weighed it down, tainting the edges grey once again the moment my mental shouts faded. However, the slight recession had let something click in my mind particularly because of a dull ache in my abdomen. The telltale ache of mana usage. This place is affected by my mana somehow... Once I was on that train of thought, I was able to ride it to remind myself how I'd somehow entered the youth's mental space in the first place. Some strange blend of and . One handled manipulating Pith with my mana and the other connecting with the pathways in the mind. More curious to me was the overlap of both, which was the Skill nature of them.

There was no sense trying to apply logic to the fact that I was hovering inside Billy's mind, but I remembered the other time I'd intentionally invaded someone's mind. Charles had been pitiful compared to the oppressive force I sensed from the black, but I leaned on that experience nonetheless. Since I needed a Skill to focus on, I zeroed on . Without my Antler Helm, I couldn't amplify it into , but the concept behind the Skill seemed the most fitting to the situation.

With my eyes focused on Billy's absent gaze I triggered the Skill. A ripple of umber flickered around me, a wispy ghost of what my earth armor usually looked like. The ache manifested in my gut, but that was common. Pain was common. What the poor youth was enduring at the hands of the Dreg... that I could barely imagine. My frustrations at my failings, at my shortcomings, became the fuel as I fed . A few seconds later, it ran out of body to cover but I kept fueling it. Pushing it out to defend against the black poison of the Dreg.

To my surprise, a manifestation of my helm, a boney white pair of antlers, appeared on my head and the umber mana turned into a laser aimed right at Billy. The stream of brown light struggled to cross the boundary of grey, bowing like an elastic, before my concerted effort of mana punched through and struck the youth in the chest. Immediately, a much more solid version of my stone protection manifested around the youth. I could sense a will brush against my own. Weak, exhausted. A slowly spinning circle of mana circled Billy and I recognized it for what it was. His Gift, and it was the only thing keeping the black from claiming him whole.

Billy! You need to fight! I yelled through my mind. You need to fight the Dreg!

The words seemed to snap the boy to attention, as if sensing the slight receding of the grey fragmentation around him. Almost immediately, the circle of grey spun up. It tried to strangle the beam of mana coming from me, but I just kept feeding my Skill. As the youth stirred, the grey stopped reclaiming the territory of his whitespace. The Gift snapped at everything, grey and umber alike. The behavior and my effort reminded me of my bouts with Rachael. This was some primal form of Gift Wrestling, but this was the core of Billy fighting for its survival as a whole. I got you.

Gritting my teeth for what I was sure would be one of the top most unpleasant things I'd ever done, I fed more mana to my Skill. Immediately, the strain was palatable. I had no way to gauge my mana in the mindscape I found myself in, but it didn't matter at the moment. I strengthened Billy's armor to encase him whole and then I focused on his Gift and tried to pick it as a target. My mana flowed out of me like water through a sieve. The weak band of grey gained a helical companion of umber and Billy finally stirred.

I was ejected out of the mindscape explosively. My vision only caught a brief look of Samuel before I curled in on myself like a pretzel. I was half certain I heard some of my tendons snap under the pressure I exerted on my body. Am I screaming? I couldn't be sure, but I knew that it was only a few seconds before the pain overwhelmed me and a blackness of my own surged to protect me from the pain of consciousness.

---+---

The world slowly came into view, but it was an exercise in agony. Every twitch of muscle, even the ones on my face, ached beyond any right they had to hurt.

"Ronan!" a call reached my ears. Turning my eyeballs, which also hurt, I spotted a mop of blonde hair blocking the light from a torch set up behind them. Said mop slowly came into focus as a concerned Samuel. "You've been out for a few hours. How are you feeling?"

I worked my aching jaw a few times before I managed to get out a response. "Hurt."

If it wouldn't have hurt to grimace I would have when I saw Samuel's decentralized nerves unspool from his palms. The freakiest thing about them was that you couldn't feel them. I hadn't paid a whole lot of attention to Alexis' and Ava's hypothesis on the nature of his particular Trait, but I knew it creeped me out. Alas, my everything hurt so I wasn't able to squirm away from my friend's probing.

"You have hairline fractures on several of your bones and I don't know how many ligaments torn. My anatomy is failing me in that regard here, but it's a lot. I've hit you with several , even one , so I don't want to risk putting you into Overhealed Affliction territo--"

"Is he awake?" another voice interrupted Sam. Eric.

"Yes, but he is--"

"Ronan," the man once again interrupted my friend as he came into view. I could see there were tears in his eyes, but none of that frustrated grief seemed to be present anymore. "I... thank you."

"Huh?" That's all you are getting. I think I probably tore my vocal chords too.

"B-Billy... He--" It was Sam's turn to interrupt the man.

"He doesn't know. Ron just woke up," the blonde said, turning to the older man. I couldn't see Sam's face, even if it hadn't hurt to turn my head, but I could practically hear the glare from where I laid.

"Oh." Eric looked distinctly uncomfortable as it finally dawned on him that he'd stumbled on what amounted to a medical scan. I'm not wearing a shirt either, huh. Just out of the corner of my eye I could see some of my spider webbing arteries full of slurry. One of the lovely additions that had blunted the man's own strikes to my chest however long ago I'd arrived at the medical room.

"Is... okay. Billy?" I managed to ask.

Samuel and Eric shared a look before my friend started to explain what had happened after I touched Billy. Nothing at first, my eyes rolled up into the back of my head and Sam started to probe me for what had happened. Eric had to be bodily restrained by cords of and cords of vines courtesy of Sam himself. A few seconds after, however, I started to glow brown, before it crawled down my hand into the catatonic boy to encase him as well. That was when things kicked up a notch. Sand and pellets of rock swirled around the two of us as if our Attunements were battling it out. Some time during that engagement, Billy snapped awake and actively took control of a spell chain. When that happened, the script spell chain of Entity-granted Skills encased it, choked it and exploded in a spray of sand. Said explosion left me squirming on the floor, and Billy more or less back in control of his faculties.

The youth was more than a bit shaken by the exchange, and was only able to exchange a few words with Sam and his father before he passed out. The youth hadn't even had time to really come to grip with his non-legs before knocking out. Thanks to a follow up scan courtesy of the local human CT, they knew Billy was just asleep and not back into a coma.

Throughout the whole explanation I struggled to focus as the pain flowed through my body. It had improved noticeably compared to when I'd interacted with Billy, even from when I'd woken up, but it still left me muddled. Nonetheless, I let out a sigh of relief. If all it took was pain, then it was worth it to save the Afflicted Trainees.

Unfortunately, that was also a source of problems. At some point during the retelling, the other parents and family of the Trainees became aware of my return to consciousness. The unfortunate part came in the form of frantic begging for intervention. One particularly bulky man with deep azure scales like a band across his forehead shoved Eric out of the way in his rush to demand for my help.

Samuel was quite stunned by the display; he didn't react fast enough to stop the man from grabbing hold of my arm. The offending limb might as well have been jelly held together by my Limestone Skin. The howl of pain that ripped out of me was enough to shock the man into letting go. It also caused all the other petitioners to take several steps back in alarm.

Sam struggled to regain some semblance of order after that development. I could see my friend wanted to be done with the social engagement entirely. Even with Eric's help, the insistence of the small crowd remained. They were no longer demanding to have their family looked after right away --my handicapped state was more than obvious-- so instead they argued about the order.

I didn't have the words to spare to even fight back on the absurd situation. It wasn't a matter of me not wanting to help the trainees, but that they were being ridiculous about the whole situation and therefore putting stress on Samuel. I wanted to personally smack them all for their audacity, but just the thought of doing so hurt.

Thankfully, the commotion didn't just attract desperate family members. Like an angry cloud, a familiar group of trainees interposed themselves between Samuel, me and the parents.

"Oy! Last I heard this wasn't the communal bonfire or the after hours brawls. What in the Fall are you lot screaming about in the medical building for?" said a loud voice in a compact body. I could just barely make out the top of the newcomers' hair. There were a handful of others lingering in the doorway as the short person pushed forward.

I recognized the fae twins and the pugilist dwarf but their names eluded me as I worked through the bout of pain the scaled man had inflicted on me. I did, however, have enough presence of mind to hear the crowd of adults get scolded into submission by the boisterous survivors of the Dreg ritual. The dwarven girl practically growled at one of the parents that tried to bring up some baseless counter argument.

When they saw their hopes dashed, the group returned to check on their family members in the other beds while throwing side glances at me.

"Don't worry boss man." My brain finally attached the proper name to the female dwarf: Hilda. "We've got your back. Just do what you need to do."

The fae twins turned and exchanged some words with Samuel, but with the jump in pain and the stress of the whole situation I felt my eyes begin to droop once again. Voices turned into droning that practically put me to sleep. The arrival of the trainees had provided the last modicum of security I needed to relax and let the arduous process of healing really begin.