50 Salvation

It only took Neita ten minutes to find the source of the fire. It was a cluster of camp tents set ablaze between a riverside and hill. Most of the tents were burning and the wind was pushing the flaming cloth against the remaining tents, leaving nothing unscathed.

When Neita came close to the campsite, snowing started falling rapidly and impeded her vision. She wasn't able to spot the bodies laid out among the alleys of the tents until she right on top of them and the fire. She panicked at the thought of them being dead and quickly rushed to the nearest body, hoping something in her training could help.

Sadly there was no pulse on the first man's neck; he laid perfectly still and cold, eyes open with an emotionless face. Neita ignored the pain prickling at her heart and began looking among the other bodies. No one she found had escaped the grasp of death.

'What the hell happened here?' Neita ran around panicking while trying to find at least one survivor, but none of this was making any sense. Everyone there was dead and some of the causes of death were not easily identifiable.

A few bodies had necks broken at odd angles, two were completely decapitated, and the rest were just laying down like they collapsed for no apparent reason. There wasn't even any signs of pain or poison foaming along their faces, just cold death.

She took a step back and failed to understand anything that had recently occurred in this burning camp. She was about to give up and start heading back to call in a report, but she tripped on one of the bodies. It wouldn't have seemed strange but she could have sworn she felt it flinched at her touch and that sparked a little bit of hope in Neita's chest.

Upon closer inspection, the dead woman at here feet was actually alive. She had a very sickly colored skin like she was nearly at death's door and remnants of sweat still stuck to her clothes. But none of that meant she was completely gone. Neita felt an extremely weak pulse and immediately thought of something she could try. This unconscious woman before her was in too weak of a condition to be moved so she'd have to improvise treatment.

Neita swung her work satchel to her front and rapidly began searching inside. She pulled her fist out with a little glass bottle filled with peculiar colored peas tightly clutched. The little peas inside were preserved buds of a rare plant called Dryad tears. A plant only capable of growing from the grave of a dryad for a few years before inevitably wilting.

She took two of the beads and popped them into the woman's mouth; when doing so, Neita saw the unconscious woman didn't have a tongue. The stump in her mouth looked to be recently severed in a forceful bite that was now mostly infected. Small pools of puss and brown blood was sitting in the crevices of her gums.

Neita took note of that and rolled her to her side to let the rare material run its course, causing the woman vomit all across the grass.

One of the main affects of putting a raw Dryad tear's bud in someone's stomach was its fast acting ability to start spewing toxins and slickly fluids out of a human's body. From the dark green color of the vomit, she seemed to only a few hours away from dying, if not for Neita's interference.

She tried comforting the unconscious woman by carefully pulling her away from the smoky areas and put her in a position that was safe if she threw up again. After she did what she could in the moment, Neita looked back at the inferno to find more survivors. Finding this dying woman gave her renewed strength to search.

Neita quickly found herself running around the edge near the river and discovered a large concentration of bodies along the water. All of them had the same strange and unknown cause of death despite no physical injuries. She found no one else alive or even near death after quite a bit of searching and decided nothing else could be done.

She then began thinking of what to do next with lone survivor, when out of the corner of her eye, she noticed an opening in the wreckage of flaming tents. A once large pavilion tent was now completely burned black and collapsed in the center of the camp.

In the shadows of the fire, she saw the outline of a hunched over body in the ashes. Neita was about to go running over, but stopped when she felt something radiating from the tent. She felt like anger and sadness was somehow wafting from the body, so she slowly approached instead. Her heart began racing when she realized what she saw.

*****

The night ended quickly with Vallori and Galahad escorting the drunken James to her apartment. He left her the honor of taking him inside and walked back out to the villa with all his bags still in his arms. Galahad felt the buzz of alcohol disperse as he walked back to the villas alone in the frigid night. It was too late to travel at that time of night, so he determined it was best to stay one final time.

Snow began falling as he went to bed and it kept snowing until morning he woke up. A fresh sheet of snow was encasing the hills and letting everyone know winter had officially arrived. Seems his delay last night was a sign of good fortune, he wouldn't have wanted to deal with getting lost or stuck in the snow storm that night.

He walked out of Bluewalk that morning, looking like every other adventurer who came from Diagon and was returning after a night in the dungeons. He followed the few dozen adventurers on the road while they road on individual horses or in groups via cart. He felt something closer to tranquility when he traveled with the mass of adventurers, it made him feel a bit more at home.

Galahad felt kinda glad for the delay too, his long chat with Vallori in the tavern made him feel a bit like someone understood what he was going through. She may not have seen and experienced the same things, but her wanting to deal with an intense problem instead of just forgetting it ever happened was what actually connected to Galahad.

Neither one of them talked about the details or what exactly happened to them, but the feeling of pain and frustration were clearly apparent when they talked about how their families reacted. Galahad left with less pain in his heart than when he entered.

When he walked along the roads, he occasionally felt odd, because he kept thinking of all the melted armor to be sitting somewhere beneath his skin whenever he saw someone still wearing theirs. He played with the activation a few times in the villa and everything still worked. The transition of black liquid leaking out of his body and hardening into its original form of armor with the black shade started to feel more natural as time went on.

The idea of it was strange, but it started to feel like a second skin, even the enchanted mask that bled out of his face didn't feel like anything until he realized it was just sitting along his nose. Now that the mask was far more menacing with the black skull-like appearance instead of the cartoony sky blue, he decided to keep it.

Galahad reviewed everything popping up in his sight to pass the time on his walk. He read over his 'Lone Survivor' title; felt his Chi swish around his body without fully activating it; and checked over all his stat values. Every once and a while he would glance at the list of mana orbs now sitting in his bag. Only half a dozen remained and he looked at the list so many times, that he practically memorized the names and levels.

[ Rabid Abath lvl. 18 ] [ Locked ]

[ Boulder Golem lvl. 11 ] [ Locked ]

[ Cephalopodic Walker lvl. 16 ] [ Locked ]

[ Ice Bat lvl. 11 ] [ Locked ]

[ Succubus lvl. 31 ] [ Locked ]

[ Wendigo lvl. 19 ] [ Locked ]

The pile was a now a mixture of what he grabbed from the bandit camp and the warden's den. A few of them were just out of reach of his level, driving him crazy to hurry up and find a way to get more mana orbs.

He also took into account the soreness in his ribs as a motivator too. He almost completed healing the fractures from his fight with the hollow puppet of Dante and the Fangs of Nyt, unfortunately he only had enough mana orbs to get rid of the fractures but not a lot of the bruising.

Galahad kept walking along with his gear slung to the side that wasn't in pain the rest of the trip, and made to Bluewalk's neighboring city without any problems this time. There weren't bandits to rob him or guards trying to swindle him. He had finally reached the city that was supposively going to give him the salvation he needed to save his friends.

*****

Neita made her way to the scorched table with very stale or burnt food scattered across it. She peered over the table to see a small boy sitting on his knees and hunched over a mound of recently upturned dirt. He seemed very much alive as he was mumbling with his head down and eyes closed, he seemed completely oblivious to the fire scorching the scene around him.

She wanted to call out to the boy, but the air around him was resonating with green sparks that made her feel very afraid to simply even talk with him. Just when she was about to muster the courage to call out to him, the boy opened his eyes and looked up to the snowy skies.

He grabbed the pack laying beside him and put both of his arms to the night air, when he did that a blur of black feathers snatch him so fast that Neita didn't even get a chance to cry out in shock.

She unknowingly witnessed Arma making an oath to avenge his father and the arson he committed to the camp was to wipe himself from his past. Neita couldn't piece together the story, but she was going to do the best she could to find out.