"Collapsed left lung. Disconnect it and relieve the pleural pressure first."
"Stop wasting your time on that leg. The abdominal bleeding is what’s killing him."
"Three fractured ribs, one puncturing inward. Stabilize the chest before moving him. I'll be back in two minutes."
"He’s already gone. Cover the body and move to the next patient."
"Not salvageable. The whole skull is fractured and the brain has been smashed. I'm not wasting my energy on that."
"You. Hold pressure there. Harder. If the bleeding resumes with its previous severity, call me immediately."
"Minor burns only. It only looks bad. Keep him hydrated."
"Internal hemorrhaging. Move aside."
Landing beside the patient, I pressed my right hand against the side of their abdomen and [Will]ed the bleeding to cease, then moved on without bothering with the accumulated blood that could overwhelm the damaged organs entirely.
"I overheard a certain little fairy I sent to the Prime Temple came home crowned in the glorious mantle of a healer, and what do I see here?"
A familiar voice captured a sliver of my attention while I was steadily making my way through the rows of injured, carrying out [Awareness] [Diagnosis], accompanied by a cycling group of Seekers and temporarily-drafted refugees who were educated enough to know what I was telling them to do.
Turning my head for a second without stopping my manual [Examination] helped by a background [Focus]ed [Awareness] that was doing three-quarters of the work of discovering internal injuries, I spotted an armored figure.
I immediately knew who was under it.
The fourth floor Lower Temple Guardian.
Born on that very floor sixty or so years ago, he challenged his [Fate] step by step by displaying the [Determination] and [Talent] needed for the Faith to take him in, first starting as a Seeker, then eventually shifting to the Sentinel Path due to not wishing his Path to end here.
Guardian Elric.
"Glorious, maybe. Glamorous, certainly not," I answered. "I've already passed healing around fifty people because I intentionally decided not to waste my energy on them. Too expensive. I don't think many of them are going to be of this world much longer."
"The burden of power," he said as he parted the crowd that surrounded me with heavy, armored steps. "If it's of any consolation, I've already had to kill hundreds since this little city-wide multi-faction war commenced."
"And if it's of any consolation, as a two-year-old fairy, I have yet to develop any manner of empathy beyond that required to proceed with required socializations. Everyone here could die, and I wouldn't care one bit about it beyond-"
"Beyond extending your future resurrection list. Yeah, yeah, I know," he cut me off in a nice way.
"Happy for you to have been sent here. Now, if you'll allow me, I need to make sure no one we invited within the premises triggers my [Instinct]. Run to me if someone tries to kill you, don't waste your oh-so precious energy where it's not needed."
Just as he appeared, in less than one minute, he vanished back into the throng of bodies, showing off his comprehensive set of Aspects that encompassed all the foundational abilities required to one day grow into something more.
Except whereas he developed that in sixty years, I would do so in ten.
And when he died powerless and unknown in one forgotten corner of the Nexus Realm, I would resurrect him to tell him what show-offs get in return for bragging.
"Get ready to amputate that leg if it doesn't get better by the time I make a second pass at it. It's up to that girl's Aspects."
Whoever wound up in charge of this section of the field hospital nodded, then in turn started giving instructions to his own underling healers, delegating my instructions further.
Such was the acceptable price of being understaffed.
Examining patient after patient, never exceeding half a minute spent on each one.
Giving clear instructions on what to do, how, when, and where.
Being the one people went to whenever a healing situation they couldn't deal with occurred...
That's what healing rounds were about.
Oddly, I had done this so much by now that I wasn't even being really [Guided] throughout it all.
I had learned how to do it.
[Guided] was simply there to be my sort-of [Omniscient] overseer, to which I could turn whenever I had doubts.
It was really all there was to it.
It was also a firsthand experience with how devastating conflicts of interest could get if mishandled.
Entire minor factions manipulated into doing the bidding of a single entity that most certainly did not have their collective best interest at heart.
Whole streets going up in flames because they unfortunately neighbored something they wanted to damage but didn't have the resources to.
Thousands of Essence Entities returning to nothingness, never to live up to their potential, simply because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Unfairness.
Realism.
Negative emotions.
My [Awareness], combined with how [Insight]ful I cultivated my mind to be, made me cognizant of things I could not overlook simply because I wanted to.
It was Civilization.
In all its [Glory].
In all its [Horror].
A [Duality].
Civilization was everything.
Both the worst and the best.
Both hopeless Essence Entities that would never amount to anything, and the likes of my existence.
"...surrender the families of the Threadforge Guild!"
"...know they're here!"
Another commotion reached my ears.
One amongst hundreds.
I registered it and moved on to my next patient.
"...are you?"
"...are Rustfang! And we..."
"...injured half of our members!"
When the commotion grew loud enough for heads to turn, [Guided] changed my optimal healing round itinerary to take me closer to the source, all while enabling me to continue to examine patients and render [Diagnosis].
"...we are demanding, not asking!"
"Rustfang has no authority to demand anything. Leave the premises of the Faith Of The Aspects' Lower Temple before we make an example out of you."
"You don't want to do that."
"Try and see. You'll be going against everyone present."
"Those cowards mean nothing! Right, Rustfang‽"
Listening to what could only be a situation quickly getting out of control and past the point of diplomatic solutions, [Guided] reminded me of my priorities, and I started signaling everyone to move the injured away while retreating.
Sentinels and militia refugees alike were converging towards the area where Rustfang had staked its claim, and as any competent Sentinel ought to do, I readied myself to join if things came down to it, but was just as prepared to go back to being a harmless healer.
"Do you have proof of their crimes?"
"We don't need no proof! And you're outnumbered!"
"So what? Are you going to declare war on the Faith? Back off, and that will be it. Otherwise, you'll not live long enough to be able to regret it."
"Give us the Threadforge Guild members then!"
"No, we won't."
"Then there's no need to discuss further. Rustfang!"
Hearing hundreds unsheathe their weapons at once could have made for an impressive intimidation maneuver...
Had I not been surrounded by allies, been able to flee anytime if need be, and been a trained Sentinel who earned her Initiate rank legitimately.
"Bulwark formation!"
"Get 'em!"
"Go for the kills!"
Taking to the smoky heights the instant things went to shit alongside hundreds of fellow flight-abled who were either allies of the same mind as me, random refugees who wished to flee, or Rustfang members who had the same idea as me, the commotion officially ceased to be one and transformed into an active battlefield.
My role was as clear as the Red Sand Realm's sky.
I gave myself in to [Guided] and stopped holding back as I started cautiously circling the conflict area to get behind it with no one the wiser.
It wasn't about exceeding my daily Essence development quota anymore.
I manifested my [Will] to enhance everything about me.
My muscles tightened and strengthened.
My joints sharpened into fluid responsiveness.
My wings carved even more effortlessly through the air.
My armor lightened around my frame.
My [Awareness] expanded and clarified.
My single unsheathed needle sword gained a luster of lethal readiness.
I embraced the [Darkness], both the literal one that was present everywhere, and the metaphorical one that was spilling from the hearts of everyone here.
Rapidly, the battlefield enlarged to encompass multiple streets, plunging everything into [Chaos], and that's when I reached the other side and found my first target.
Isolated.
Wearing dangerously thick plated armor.
Dueling someone wearing a standard Sentinel armor suit.
I dove down and let my [Awareness] provide [Guided] with the information it needed for me to swiftly plunge my sword through the right shoulder joint's gap, surgically piercing through a tendon one couldn't do without if they wanted to be able to lift their right arm.
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The species didn't matter.
Once my first strike was done and the reaction only then began, I took the time to retract my sword and immediately took off towards a neighboring fight, where two Rustfangs were recklessly ganging up on a single Sentinel.
One of whom had been stupid enough not to wear a helmet.
An opportunity, accompanied by my still-bloodied needle sword sliding into her brain through her left orbital cavity, put an end to her struggles as someone who was presently endangering my continued existence.
Then I moved on to my next target of opportunity, wielding my entire Essence in [Harmony].
[Awareness] kept me conscious of anything that transpired around me.
[Insight] refined it into meaning and prevented me from misreading what I perceived.
[Focus] filtered out irrelevances and allowed me to endure through the hundreds of relevant details my [Awareness] was catching and that my [Insight]s insisted were notable.
[Cultivation] replenished my spent energy, substituted the tenuous task of breathing, and managed my straining physicality by expelling the unavoidable filth produced during intense [Exertion]s.
[Darkness] denied the battlefield its advantage over me, never allowing myself to be drawn into unfavorable engagements.
[Will] brought out my everything without fearing I would let myself down.
And finally, [Guided] unified it all, simultaneously teaching me what it looked like to live up to what may as well be my complete potential, and allowing me to achieve it so long as I made myself [Worthy] of it by not sparing a single sliver of [Exertion].
I was nothing if not [Worthy].
Some perceived me before I struck.
Some countered before I could react.
Some of my strikes failed.
Some I had to abort.
I witnessed hesitation turn into a lethal strike.
I beheld refugees being used as shields.
I heard pleadings and cries for help.
Two Guardian-level battles wrought carnage on the battlefield, unprepared individuals being transformed into bloody paste for just standing too close to them.
Until eventually, after what felt like an hour but could have just as easily been sixteen minutes, the Faith did what it did second best behind the Nexus Order, and [Order] reemerged from [Chaos], hundreds of bodies, mainly Rustfang members but not only, lying dead on the floor as proof of that.
"Retreat!"
"Retreat to the warehouse!"
"Scatter!"
The fighting didn't stop even when the call for retreat was made by what I suspected to be Rustfang leadership.
Sentinels pursued, including Guardian Elric and Guardian Cipactli, who had slowly and methodically decimated their opposition.
They were clearly not intent on stopping until they ran all who dared to attack the Faith to the ground.
It wasn't my battle anymore from there, however.
Or rather, the battle itself wasn't.
The aftermath, though, I had a relatively critical healer duty to fulfill there.
So I turned towards what had until only minutes ago been an active battle zone and started calling for Seekers and what little medical personnel there were to start aiding me.
It was time for some triaging, with prejudiced priorities and energy allocated towards Faith members, and mainly qualified Sentinels who could be returned to an approximate battle-ready state as soon as possible.
There was no price for-
A flash of white consumed my [Awareness].
A violent, all-devouring whiteness that swallowed shape, color, distance, and thought alike.
For one impossible instant, everything disappeared beneath it.
Then came the screams.
Someone shrieking in absolute terror.
Someone else choking halfway through a sentence.
The wet sound of flesh hitting metal.
Crying.
Begging.
Panic erupting anew.
All at once.
And then the air itself slammed into me hard enough to both make my bones creak and unwillingly send me back into the air.
Heat washed across my body in a searing wave while pressure tore through damaged streets, ripping off entire buildings, loose metal platings, broken weapons, and bodies as if they weighed nothing.
The world devolved into a sequence of motion and noise that I could not make any sense of as I lost all sense of orientation for a moment before [Guided] forced my wings open through an outburst of [Will].
From nothing to everything, I expanded my [Awareness] to my utmost limits in an instant, taking in everything and more beyond.
People were thrown screaming into walls.
Others simply vanished beneath collapsing structures.
I [Will]ed myself to stop.
Pain shot through my entire body as I caught the air violently, my wings nearly unmade by my attempt, but successfully stabilizing myself nonetheless.
I was still blinded, however, so I [Will]ed my blinded eyes to [Focus].
The world stopped being a veil of white.
And that's when I saw it.
A monstrous sphere of black smoke and raging fire blooming outward from a location that, thank the Nexus, wasn't the Lower Temple.
Less than five seconds had passed since the detonation; that, I was certain of.
The thousands upon thousands of burning metallic fragments and shattered debris still erupting from its core, tearing through the air, leaving incandescent trails behind, were proof enough of that.
As many questions as there were luminous trails lit up in my mind for a second.
How could an explosion of such magnitude take place here?
Did it have anything to do with the fleeing Rustfang?
Was it an attack against the Faith, or an accident?
What could even cause such an event to happen?
Would an actual faction soon descend upon this Lower Temple and start indiscriminately killing everyone?
What were my priorities?
Safety first.
Safety was either fleeing or going to-
Guardian Elric.
Guardian Cipactli.
Both of whom had been pursuing the fleeing Rustfang members.
Putting the Lower Temple behind me, the detonation had occurred in the direction of those same fleeing Rustfang members.
Were they both already dead?
How would I even find them if they had been injured to the point of being considered dying?
So many questions.
Contemplating the idea that Guardian Elric may be living through his last second of existence as I was thinking finally got me moving.
If it had been a Knight, I wouldn't have been worried, but a Guardian was just that in the end.
What's more, a local Guardian.
Tilting my balance forward, I took off towards the inferno of liquid smoke and molten metal.
Just like I willingly held onto prejudiced priorities towards Faith members mere minutes ago, this time, I shifted my priorities towards one I had a form of significant relationship with.
I wasn't immune to putting my own interests above those of others.
It wasn't about finding a strong enough rationale for me to justify doing so, it was just the way of Civilization.
One Guardian Elric was presently more valuable to me than a hundred Warriors, illogical as that might be.
I pierced through the heat and smoke without raising an eyebrow, having long closed my worthless eyes and ceased to breathe using my puny biological lungs.
Hovering not even a metre above the ground, I [Will]ed my [Awareness] to be [Focus]ed on the ground, scanning for bodies.
I started from as close to the epicenter as I could get, because the closer Elric had been to it, the higher the chances of him presently being in a critical condition.
One twisted circle after another, I discovered dozens upon dozens of people who had had either their physical vessels splattered into hundreds of parts or their internals mushed into a fine homogenous paste inside bodies that now had as much life in them as rust powder.
Sentinels, Rustfang members, innocent refugees...
The detonation had been indiscriminate.
Then my [Awareness] touched upon a familiar-looking armor.
I abruptly braked and darted towards it.
All limbs present, scorch marks evident and widespread, no obvious fracture lines.
The armor held.
The individual contained inside...
Guardian Elric...
Not so much.
No breathing.
No heartbeat.
And yet...
I lifted his visor, finding his eyes decisively locking onto mine, his dark pupil narrowing as I exposed them to [Light].
He should be dead.
He wasn't.
Not yet.
Soon, though.
Sixty years of developing one's Essence to lay the foundation for a grand Path had that annoying effect of slowly dissociating oneself from the weakness of one's base biology's prospects.
I gave myself and [Guided] a second to evaluate our priorities.
I didn't have the [Strength] to pull him out of the smoke-packed air, and calling for giants to help me lift him out implied some would hear me, be willing to step into what looked like [Death], and enter the still burning pit.
Too many failure points.
Field healing, it was.
My [Awareness] penetrated through the scorched armor suit to start scouring through the flash-cooked, wrecked body concealed inside.
I still had a good half of my optimal energy reserve available, plus whatever my regeneration-[Focus]ed [Cultivation] brought, but if I were to do anything so as not to waste a single drop of much-needed energy, I needed to first perfectly ascertain what I was dealing with.
Gaping wounds torn open beneath fractured armor plating.
Massive cranial trauma accompanied by uncontrolled intracranial bleeding.
Lungs reduced to shredded ruin drowning in blood.
Ribs shattered inward, piercing whatever organs had not already been pulped by the kinetic blast.
A broken neck and a spine fragmented into catastrophic splinters.
Major blood vessels ruptured throughout the body, continuously hemorrhaging into every available cavity, both inside the body and out.
Surface tissues burnt to a crisp.
Muscles, tendons, and connective tissues torn apart by acceleration, impact, and shockwave pressure.
A nervous system collapsing beneath catastrophic full-body trauma.
No breathing.
No heartbeat.
Only a remnant of consciousness, Elric's Essence stubbornly holding on.
Things were, evidently, worse than the worst I ever willingly treated.
By an entire Strata.
The damage was so extensive and far-reaching, in fact, that I threw saving all of his limbs out the windows from the onset.
As for my only immediate plan of action upon evaluating the overall severity, I wondered if it could still be called what I had read-learned to be damage control.
Because I had no intention of overestimating my capabilities and ending up short on the other end.
In this case, that meant restoring only what was absolutely necessary for Elric to have the opportunity to live to fight another day for his own continued existence.
Having no time to waste, I stopped delaying and got to work.
And having even less of an intention to fail, I let [Guided] take over and completely disregarded not having a completed surgery map to follow.
Instead of worrying, I put my [Faith] in myself and [Guided], unsheathed my sharpest-edged needle sword, and got started on the most energy-efficient way of diminishing the risk of greater aggravation.
His armor being too thick and there being no convenient straps for me to unmake, I was limited to joint gap incisions and pinpoint-[Focus]ed punctures.
Relying on my [Awareness], I started cutting off all the blood vessels not leading from the heart to the lungs and the brain and back, decisively closing all unnecessary pathways for blood to leak further.
Effectively, I condemned everything else to biological death.
It was not an elegant solution.
It was a practical solution.
One that had me bounce all over Elric's armored form while repeatedly stabbing his to-be corpse.
It wasn't like his brain was even able to interpret the nervous signals for pain anymore.
After salvaging what was left of his circulatory system for the sole purpose of connecting his lungs, heart, and brain, I [Will]ed the countless lesser ruptures present therein to close.
Not heal, too expensive.
Close.
Then, I proceeded to climb on top of his torso and angled my needle sword downwards to deliver a sharp thrust into the thoracic cavity.
A weak spurt of blood escaped outward, relieving pressure around the motionless heart.
A second thrust followed at a different angle, reaching the left lung.
I repeated the same thrust, angled differently, to reach the left lung and reiterate something I had already done by [Will]ing all the liquid, solid, and even the air itself, out of this lung, restoring it to working order.
As for the right lung, I severed it off completely at the tracheal keel, leaving it to drown in blood within the ruined chest cavity.
I had no energy to waste on a complete or perfect solution.
With the heart, one lung, and the minimal circulatory loop barely prepared, I [Will]ed the heart into motion again and forced the body to draw breath despite shattered ribs protruding inward, a compromised diaphragm, and catastrophic thoracic instability.
A wet gurgle sounded from his helmet as air attempted to be directed towards the restored lung, and I helped it along by [Will]ing all the obstructing liquids and solids to be expelled, clearing the trachea.
The surrounding air remained thick with smoke and toxins, but for someone who earned the Sentinel Guardian rank, breathing poisonous smoke for a couple of minutes was the least of their issues.
What needed to be done now was to ease the transition from dying to being in critical condition.
That process began with four precise thrusts into the skull, relieving pressure from the multiple massive intracranial hemorrhages compressing the brain.
And then came a truly monstrous task.
The most complex type of healing there was.
Brain healing.
There was no sacrificing one section to preserve another with that type of healing, no ignoring parts of it to save the whole.
Or perhaps there was, theoretically, but none of the medical texts I studied had ever provided me or [Guided] with the depth of knowledge necessary to identify and reconstruct every damaged vessel, pathway, and neural structure individually.
Attempting precise [Will] healing with an incomplete understanding would only worsen the damage, just like relying on shallow knowledge to [Will] things into being was worse than simply [Will]ing things to be restored to how they were meant to be.
So I did just that.
I [Will]ed the brain toward the state it was meant to exist in.
My energy reserves vanished at a horrifying pace, consumed like fuel thrown into the paradoxical fire of [Will]ing something nearly impossible into reality.
Still, even if I had to stop before I bottomed myself out, leaving evident damages...
I achieved what I needed to.
Elric's brain was as stabilized as I could make it.
The remainder of my energy reserve, a miserable twentieth, or even thirtieth, of my utmost, was reserved for enabling the propagation of this stability to his heart and his breathing.
Because both wanted nothing else than to stop.
I was the only one preventing them from.
Meaning, now was the time to address what I was otherwise powerless to change by myself.
I [Will]ed for stability one last time, then took off, shortly exiting the murky, dusty, scorching air present so close to the epicenter of the detonation.
"You, you, you. We have a Guardian to save. With me," I called the first three Sentinels I saw, gave them adequate motivation, then turned around.
First, Guardian Elric.
Second, Guardian Cipactli.
Third...
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