Chapter 31
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"Lady Sushie!" one of the surviving guardsmen cried out. Even with one of his legs hanging limp, he tried to drag himself over to the carriage, using his sword as a cane.
"Now hold on there, soldier!" I reached out to grab him under the armpit, supporting his weight. "Don't push yourself."
"You don't understand! My life is nothing if the young miss is hurt! We all swore an oath…!" His voice grew weaker as he glanced at his fallen comrades, "… we all swore an oath to defend… until death…"
The door to the carriage opened, and a little girl with long blond hair and dressed in frilly pink clothes and a big white pillow hat clambered out. She was crying and shouting, "Is someone there? Someone, please! Help!"
"Young Lady Orlinde!" the guard cried out. "Are you hurt!?"
"I'm… *sniff* I'm fine! But Gramps… Gramps is…! HELP!"
She pushed the carriage door open even further, and showed lying there on the carriage floor a gray-haired old man in black formal outfit. Blood flowed over his white undershirt as he wheezed in pain.
"Please save Gramps!" the girl shouted out again, her young voice breaking. "He was hit by an arrow…!"
"Mister Reim is the chief manservant of the Ortlinde family!" the guard mentioned. "He must have been hit trying to protect the young lady with his body!"
"Linze! Triage!" I shouted as we approached the carriage, with me still supporting the guard's weight.
"I don't know what that means!" she shouted back, if with a sorry note to her voice.
"It means check who needs help and sort them by urgency!"
Then as I leaned the guard over to the side of the carriage, I looked at the old man in butler clothes. He stared back at me, grimacing in pain, then shook his head sadly.
"Light come forth, Soothing solace, [Cure Heal!]" I murmured, while gesturing with my palm over the cut in the guard's legs. His eyes widened as the wound receded.
"You have Healing magic!"
The little girl's eyes widened and she squealed out desperately "Please save Grampy Reim! I beg you!"
I nodded. "All right. Let's get him down. You… I don't actually know your name…"
"I am Maldon, sir!"
Slowly and gently we carried out the old man to lay him down onto the grass. Haldon then collected the surviving guards, all three others of them out of the ten guards who accompanied the carriage. Six out of ten dead, if only we had arrived earlier!
If only we had been faster!
Haste makes waste. Speed is life. Life was full of contradictory morals like that, but in the end the last to move was usually also the first to die.
The guards gathered mournfully around the old butler. He gasped for breath and tried to smile. "You did your best… Miss Sushie, we can only apologize… for failing you."
"No! Don't say that! You didn't fail anybody! All of this happened… it's not your fault! You didn't… it was me… it's got to be, or my father… you all got hurt because of me!"
And then she turned to me and with a desperate glare, asked "Why aren't you doing anything?! Please save Grampy Reim already! I… don't have much, but I'm sure father will reward you lots!"
The old butler reached out and clasped the girl's hand. "Do not… there is no need to be… rude, my dear…" he wheezed. "I'm sure… he has already tried his best. This injury of mine… it's enough that I can leave you some final words."
"No! No! I don't want to hear it!"
"You must know… that we must someday part. Not this soon, I di-.. I didn't expect. Ugh…! But I'll have you know… that the days spent with you… were among the happiest moments of this old man's life… gahk!"
His breaths began to become shallower and more labored.
"Gramps, that's enough!" She turned towards me again. "PLEASE!"
I flicked open the outer casing for my VR headset, allowing Monika's cameras to truly look at the world without hindrance. "Monika, [Diagnosis] please," I requested, no longer bothering to maintain secrecy.
I put my hand lightly around the wound, my fingers like a cage over the bloody tear in his chest.
/"[Amplify: Ultrasound],/" Monika murmured. I sent a wordless weak vibrating wave of Wind down from my palm and around my fingertips, and she analyzed the returns. Then through localized magnetic field shenanigans, build up a resonant image.
She displayed a view on the insides, the metal of the arrowhead highlighted. The shaft was broken off close to the head and bent a little to the side. It was too deep to just dig out with our fingers, we'd need forceps and scalpels to widen the wound.
"That's… really lodged in there. Why is the arrowhead snapped off? Who did this?"
"… I was… I was trying to pull the arrow out, but Grampy Leim broke it instead," the girl replied, still sniffing. The guards recoiled.
I nodded slowly. "Yeah. That's bad. Don't ever pull out an arrow or a knife until you're sure you can stop the bleeding. Most times it's the metal in there that's keeping the blood in."
"So this is my fault!" Sushie cried. "I'm sorry! Please don't die, Grampy Reim!"
"Don't blame yourself… your innocence is a precious gift." His eyes began to droop. "I am… sorry…"
"Don't you give up just yet, butler man!" I hissed out. I looked up and barked out "I need a clean cloth to staunch the wound!"
"May we pull down the carriage curtains?" one of the soldiers asked.
"Don't ask me stupid things!" the girl shrieked. "Save Grampy Reim!"
They began ripping out the curtains and handed me the green cloth. I hesitated one last time. I had never really done this before. Why in the world would I even have paramedic training?!
/"We need to apply direct pressure to staunch the wound, but that risks driving the arrowhead even deeper."/
"I guess we'll just have to risk it!" I replied. "[Come, Water!], [Come, Fire!]" I sterilized my hands with steam. Then the same to the curtains.
Linze slid next to me and I handed her half of the linens. Over her wrists, because unlike her twin sister her didn't wear full gloves. She winced, as the curtains were still piping-hot, if not unbearably so. The remaining sanitized curtains were held by Maldon.
Then I ripped open the old man's shirt to expose the wound. The little girl screamed at seeing the ragged flesh, and we could all see blood pumping out with every breath. Pieces of a broken-off arrow shaft poked out of his chest.
With both hands I pinched either side of the wound shut and bid Linze to cover it with the folded fabric. "Put pressure on this wound!"
"You- you're just going to leave the arrow in there?" Linze asked. "But… he's still bleeding. If we could [Heal] him now… we would…" her voice trailed off at the realization, "need to cut out the arrow later."
"Most important thing right now is simply to stabilize his condition. We need to make him survive the next five minutes!"
"But what if I put too much pressure and push the arrow too deep?!"
"The metal itself will seal the cut! The most important is to stop the blood from flowing!" I grimaced. "Linze! I can't keep my hands here forever!"
"All right!" she replied firmly. And then she folded over the linens and pressed it onto the wound. Slowly I eased the pressure off and let go. Then I pointed to the remaining length of fabric.
"We need to bind his chest! Tight!"
"I will do it!" Yae interjected. "Please help sit him up. I have done this sort of wound binding before."
So while Maldon helped sit the limp old butler to a slightly sitting position, Yae reached over to wind the cloth around his chest and over Linze's hands. Linze slowly slid one palm out, and Yae pulled tight to wind around, two more times. And then gingerly the other hand, to complete pressuring the blood seal.
"Come, Light! Sun's purifying touch, [Sterilizing Ray!]" I flashed over the wound.
The little girl hiccupped in distress, "Gramps! He's not breathing?! GRAAMPS WAKE UP!"
"Monika! Diagnosis?!"
/"His lungs are filling up with blood. That's why it's getting harder to breathe. It's not the blood loss that's killing him, it's going into shock and the lack of air!"/
I shifted my right hand into two pointing fingers, index and middle finger, almost like a pistol gesture. I pressed the tips of my fingers onto his side, between the ribs, and chanted "Come, Wind! Life-giving breath, [Resuscitation!]"
His empty left lung expanded, causing the old butler to wince and gasp out in pain. His chest deflated, and again I repeated the [Resuscitation] chant.
"Haaah. Hah...!" a gasp escaped his slack lips.
"Gramps?!"
"Lady Sushie…?"
"He's alive!" the guards cried out.
I nodded slowly. "Um… little girl? Sushie?" Pronounced more like 'Susie' than 'Sushi', but with a distinct 'ch' sound near the end. "It's okay, go touch his face. Warm him up with your hands. Keep him awake!"
The girl did so. "Gramps! Please stay awake! Can you hear me? Please! Can you… can you feel this?!"
"I feel… a little less close to death's door…" Reim said softly. "Aahh…." His eyes opened slowly, and he began to blink. "What… what is this feeling…?"
"You're making him breathe from the outside!" one of the guards muttered. "That's amazing!"
"Blood pressure low! Body temperature still lowering…!"
That clear-headedness was only due to the brain being feed fresh oxygen. I grit my teeth. "Light, come forth! Life's brilliant rubies! [Blood Maker!]" I pressed the fingers of my other hand to his neck to take over "Water, come! Attend life's flows! [Blood Bend!]"
/"… Heartbeat stabilizing. Player, what did you do?"/
"I'm rechanneling oxygenated blood flow from the heart to the lungs," I answered. "All the heart does is supply blood to the brain – if we can keep the brain alive, the person survives until the heart can restart."
"You can do that?!" the little girl gasped.
Linze stared at me wide-eyed. "That's… that's honestly amazing, Mister Zah. I have Light magic too, but I never heard of that spell…!"
"It's not a spell, this is just how the body works. Air energizes blood, sends it to brain and other organs, air-less blood cycles back through the veins to be pumped by the heart collecting air from the lungs. Breathing is what's important – stale blood kills."
"Everything comes from breath, all power comes from breath…" Yae murmured.
/"Actually I'm quite sure that's an original spell. I wonder if other people find it as easy as you to invent original spells? This whole 'Identify Element + Define Action + Speak [Spell Name]' system is so flexible like auto-approved prayers to redefine reality, it can't be that simple."/
Monika smirked slightly. /"I somewhat envy that you can do these targeted spells just because magic obeys intent more readily than it does ordered laws."/
"Yeah, you go ahead and do that, /Mistress of Infinite Stacking/."
"Is… is Gramps going to live?" the girl asked. "I mean… you can't keep your fingers doing that forever, right? And who is that… no, that's not important right now…" She put her hands together and pleaded shaking them towards me, "Please! Will he be okay?!"
"Depends on the tightness of the bindings. We're just waiting for his blood to clot."
"… what's that?"
"When the body is wounded, the blood hardens after a while to seal the wound. If you've ever been cut, it's why if you keep pressure on the wound it seems to stop bleeding after a while and then begins to heal. Living blood dissolves the blood clot and starts the veins flowing again if the blood could flow away without leaking.
"You may not realize it, but the body is actually plenty smart about protecting itself from damage… the human body is surprisingly robust compared to other animals, even if we look weaker. If we can just seal a wound in time, we can survive A LOT of damage that would kill large predators."
"I… don't know this. I've never been cut," she admitted sadly. "I was only trying to help, but I made things worse. I should have known this! I should… I should know this."
We sat there in that strange pose for a few more minutes, with the little girl pressing her palms to the old man's cheeks while I was stabbing my fingers into his ribs and neck. We waited to see if he would bleed out and die, even until our arms began to ache.
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"Lady Sushie!" one of the surviving guardsmen cried out. Even with one of his legs hanging limp, he tried to drag himself over to the carriage, using his sword as a cane.
"Now hold on there, soldier!" I reached out to grab him under the armpit, supporting his weight. "Don't push yourself."
"You don't understand! My life is nothing if the young miss is hurt! We all swore an oath…!" His voice grew weaker as he glanced at his fallen comrades, "… we all swore an oath to defend… until death…"
The door to the carriage opened, and a little girl with long blond hair and dressed in frilly pink clothes and a big white pillow hat clambered out. She was crying and shouting, "Is someone there? Someone, please! Help!"
"Young Lady Orlinde!" the guard cried out. "Are you hurt!?"
"I'm… *sniff* I'm fine! But Gramps… Gramps is…! HELP!"
She pushed the carriage door open even further, and showed lying there on the carriage floor a gray-haired old man in black formal outfit. Blood flowed over his white undershirt as he wheezed in pain.
"Please save Gramps!" the girl shouted out again, her young voice breaking. "He was hit by an arrow…!"
"Mister Reim is the chief manservant of the Ortlinde family!" the guard mentioned. "He must have been hit trying to protect the young lady with his body!"
"Linze! Triage!" I shouted as we approached the carriage, with me still supporting the guard's weight.
"I don't know what that means!" she shouted back, if with a sorry note to her voice.
"It means check who needs help and sort them by urgency!"
Then as I leaned the guard over to the side of the carriage, I looked at the old man in butler clothes. He stared back at me, grimacing in pain, then shook his head sadly.
"Light come forth, Soothing solace, [Cure Heal!]" I murmured, while gesturing with my palm over the cut in the guard's legs. His eyes widened as the wound receded.
"You have Healing magic!"
The little girl's eyes widened and she squealed out desperately "Please save Grampy Reim! I beg you!"
I nodded. "All right. Let's get him down. You… I don't actually know your name…"
"I am Maldon, sir!"
Slowly and gently we carried out the old man to lay him down onto the grass. Haldon then collected the surviving guards, all three others of them out of the ten guards who accompanied the carriage. Six out of ten dead, if only we had arrived earlier!
If only we had been faster!
Haste makes waste. Speed is life. Life was full of contradictory morals like that, but in the end the last to move was usually also the first to die.
The guards gathered mournfully around the old butler. He gasped for breath and tried to smile. "You did your best… Miss Sushie, we can only apologize… for failing you."
"No! Don't say that! You didn't fail anybody! All of this happened… it's not your fault! You didn't… it was me… it's got to be, or my father… you all got hurt because of me!"
And then she turned to me and with a desperate glare, asked "Why aren't you doing anything?! Please save Grampy Reim already! I… don't have much, but I'm sure father will reward you lots!"
The old butler reached out and clasped the girl's hand. "Do not… there is no need to be… rude, my dear…" he wheezed. "I'm sure… he has already tried his best. This injury of mine… it's enough that I can leave you some final words."
"No! No! I don't want to hear it!"
"You must know… that we must someday part. Not this soon, I di-.. I didn't expect. Ugh…! But I'll have you know… that the days spent with you… were among the happiest moments of this old man's life… gahk!"
His breaths began to become shallower and more labored.
"Gramps, that's enough!" She turned towards me again. "PLEASE!"
I flicked open the outer casing for my VR headset, allowing Monika's cameras to truly look at the world without hindrance. "Monika, [Diagnosis] please," I requested, no longer bothering to maintain secrecy.
I put my hand lightly around the wound, my fingers like a cage over the bloody tear in his chest.
/"[Amplify: Ultrasound],/" Monika murmured. I sent a wordless weak vibrating wave of Wind down from my palm and around my fingertips, and she analyzed the returns. Then through localized magnetic field shenanigans, build up a resonant image.
She displayed a view on the insides, the metal of the arrowhead highlighted. The shaft was broken off close to the head and bent a little to the side. It was too deep to just dig out with our fingers, we'd need forceps and scalpels to widen the wound.
"That's… really lodged in there. Why is the arrowhead snapped off? Who did this?"
"… I was… I was trying to pull the arrow out, but Grampy Leim broke it instead," the girl replied, still sniffing. The guards recoiled.
I nodded slowly. "Yeah. That's bad. Don't ever pull out an arrow or a knife until you're sure you can stop the bleeding. Most times it's the metal in there that's keeping the blood in."
"So this is my fault!" Sushie cried. "I'm sorry! Please don't die, Grampy Reim!"
"Don't blame yourself… your innocence is a precious gift." His eyes began to droop. "I am… sorry…"
"Don't you give up just yet, butler man!" I hissed out. I looked up and barked out "I need a clean cloth to staunch the wound!"
"May we pull down the carriage curtains?" one of the soldiers asked.
"Don't ask me stupid things!" the girl shrieked. "Save Grampy Reim!"
They began ripping out the curtains and handed me the green cloth. I hesitated one last time. I had never really done this before. Why in the world would I even have paramedic training?!
/"We need to apply direct pressure to staunch the wound, but that risks driving the arrowhead even deeper."/
"I guess we'll just have to risk it!" I replied. "[Come, Water!], [Come, Fire!]" I sterilized my hands with steam. Then the same to the curtains.
Linze slid next to me and I handed her half of the linens. Over her wrists, because unlike her twin sister her didn't wear full gloves. She winced, as the curtains were still piping-hot, if not unbearably so. The remaining sanitized curtains were held by Maldon.
Then I ripped open the old man's shirt to expose the wound. The little girl screamed at seeing the ragged flesh, and we could all see blood pumping out with every breath. Pieces of a broken-off arrow shaft poked out of his chest.
With both hands I pinched either side of the wound shut and bid Linze to cover it with the folded fabric. "Put pressure on this wound!"
"You- you're just going to leave the arrow in there?" Linze asked. "But… he's still bleeding. If we could [Heal] him now… we would…" her voice trailed off at the realization, "need to cut out the arrow later."
"Most important thing right now is simply to stabilize his condition. We need to make him survive the next five minutes!"
"But what if I put too much pressure and push the arrow too deep?!"
"The metal itself will seal the cut! The most important is to stop the blood from flowing!" I grimaced. "Linze! I can't keep my hands here forever!"
"All right!" she replied firmly. And then she folded over the linens and pressed it onto the wound. Slowly I eased the pressure off and let go. Then I pointed to the remaining length of fabric.
"We need to bind his chest! Tight!"
"I will do it!" Yae interjected. "Please help sit him up. I have done this sort of wound binding before."
So while Maldon helped sit the limp old butler to a slightly sitting position, Yae reached over to wind the cloth around his chest and over Linze's hands. Linze slowly slid one palm out, and Yae pulled tight to wind around, two more times. And then gingerly the other hand, to complete pressuring the blood seal.
"Come, Light! Sun's purifying touch, [Sterilizing Ray!]" I flashed over the wound.
The little girl hiccupped in distress, "Gramps! He's not breathing?! GRAAMPS WAKE UP!"
"Monika! Diagnosis?!"
/"His lungs are filling up with blood. That's why it's getting harder to breathe. It's not the blood loss that's killing him, it's going into shock and the lack of air!"/
I shifted my right hand into two pointing fingers, index and middle finger, almost like a pistol gesture. I pressed the tips of my fingers onto his side, between the ribs, and chanted "Come, Wind! Life-giving breath, [Resuscitation!]"
His empty left lung expanded, causing the old butler to wince and gasp out in pain. His chest deflated, and again I repeated the [Resuscitation] chant.
"Haaah. Hah...!" a gasp escaped his slack lips.
"Gramps?!"
"Lady Sushie…?"
"He's alive!" the guards cried out.
I nodded slowly. "Um… little girl? Sushie?" Pronounced more like 'Susie' than 'Sushi', but with a distinct 'ch' sound near the end. "It's okay, go touch his face. Warm him up with your hands. Keep him awake!"
The girl did so. "Gramps! Please stay awake! Can you hear me? Please! Can you… can you feel this?!"
"I feel… a little less close to death's door…" Reim said softly. "Aahh…." His eyes opened slowly, and he began to blink. "What… what is this feeling…?"
"You're making him breathe from the outside!" one of the guards muttered. "That's amazing!"
"Blood pressure low! Body temperature still lowering…!"
That clear-headedness was only due to the brain being feed fresh oxygen. I grit my teeth. "Light, come forth! Life's brilliant rubies! [Blood Maker!]" I pressed the fingers of my other hand to his neck to take over "Water, come! Attend life's flows! [Blood Bend!]"
/"… Heartbeat stabilizing. Player, what did you do?"/
"I'm rechanneling oxygenated blood flow from the heart to the lungs," I answered. "All the heart does is supply blood to the brain – if we can keep the brain alive, the person survives until the heart can restart."
"You can do that?!" the little girl gasped.
Linze stared at me wide-eyed. "That's… that's honestly amazing, Mister Zah. I have Light magic too, but I never heard of that spell…!"
"It's not a spell, this is just how the body works. Air energizes blood, sends it to brain and other organs, air-less blood cycles back through the veins to be pumped by the heart collecting air from the lungs. Breathing is what's important – stale blood kills."
"Everything comes from breath, all power comes from breath…" Yae murmured.
/"Actually I'm quite sure that's an original spell. I wonder if other people find it as easy as you to invent original spells? This whole 'Identify Element + Define Action + Speak [Spell Name]' system is so flexible like auto-approved prayers to redefine reality, it can't be that simple."/
Monika smirked slightly. /"I somewhat envy that you can do these targeted spells just because magic obeys intent more readily than it does ordered laws."/
"Yeah, you go ahead and do that, /Mistress of Infinite Stacking/."
"Is… is Gramps going to live?" the girl asked. "I mean… you can't keep your fingers doing that forever, right? And who is that… no, that's not important right now…" She put her hands together and pleaded shaking them towards me, "Please! Will he be okay?!"
"Depends on the tightness of the bindings. We're just waiting for his blood to clot."
"… what's that?"
"When the body is wounded, the blood hardens after a while to seal the wound. If you've ever been cut, it's why if you keep pressure on the wound it seems to stop bleeding after a while and then begins to heal. Living blood dissolves the blood clot and starts the veins flowing again if the blood could flow away without leaking.
"You may not realize it, but the body is actually plenty smart about protecting itself from damage… the human body is surprisingly robust compared to other animals, even if we look weaker. If we can just seal a wound in time, we can survive A LOT of damage that would kill large predators."
"I… don't know this. I've never been cut," she admitted sadly. "I was only trying to help, but I made things worse. I should have known this! I should… I should know this."
We sat there in that strange pose for a few more minutes, with the little girl pressing her palms to the old man's cheeks while I was stabbing my fingers into his ribs and neck. We waited to see if he would bleed out and die, even until our arms began to ache.
-
-
"Lady Sushie!" one of the surviving guardsmen cried out. Even with one of his legs hanging limp, he tried to drag himself over to the carriage, using his sword as a cane."Now hold on there, soldier!" I reached out to grab him under the armpit, supporting his weight. "Don't push yourself.""You don't understand! My life is nothing if the young miss is hurt! We all swore an oath!" His voice grew weaker as he glanced at his fallen comrades, " we all swore an oath to defend until death"The door to the carriage opened, and a little girl with long blond hair and dressed in frilly pink clothes and a big white pillow hat clambered out. She was crying and shouting, "Is someone there? Someone, please! Help!""Young Lady Orlinde!" the guard cried out. "Are you hurt!?""I'm *sniff* I'm fine! But Gramps Gramps is! HELP!"She pushed the carriage door open even further, and showed lying there on the carriage floor a gray-haired old man in black formal outfit. Blood flowed over his white undershirt as he wheezed in pain."Please save Gramps!" the girl shouted out again, her young voice breaking. "He was hit by an arrow!""Mister Reim is the chief manservant of the Ortlinde family!" the guard mentioned. "He must have been hit trying to protect the young lady with his body!""Linze! Triage!" I shouted as we approached the carriage, with me still supporting the guard's weight."I don't know what that means!" she shouted back, if with a sorry note to her voice."It means check who needs help and sort them by urgency!"Then as I leaned the guard over to the side of the carriage, I looked at the old man in butler clothes. He stared back at me, grimacing in pain, then shook his head sadly."Light come forth, Soothing solace, Cure Heal!" I murmured, while gesturing with my palm over the cut in the guard's legs. His eyes widened as the wound receded."You have Healing magic!"The little girl's eyes widened and she squealed out desperately "Please save Grampy Reim! I beg you!"I nodded. "All right. Let's get him down. You I don't actually know your name""I am Maldon, sir!"Slowly and gently we carried out the old man to lay him down onto the grass. Haldon then collected the surviving guards, all three others of them out of the ten guards who accompanied the carriage. Six out of ten dead, if only we had arrived earlier!If only we had been faster!Haste makes waste. Speed is life. Life was full of contradictory morals like that, but in the end the last to move was usually also the first to die.The guards gathered mournfully around the old butler. He gasped for breath and tried to smile. "You did your best Miss Sushie, we can only apologize for failing you.""No! Don't say that! You didn't fail anybody! All of this happened it's not your fault! You didn't it was me it's got to be, or my father you all got hurt because of me!"And then she turned to me and with a desperate glare, asked "Why aren't you doing anything?! Please save Grampy Reim already! I don't have much, but I'm sure father will reward you lots!"The old butler reached out and clasped the girl's hand. "Do not there is no need to be rude, my dear" he wheezed. "I'm sure he has already tried his best. This injury of mine it's enough that I can leave you some final words.""No! No! I don't want to hear it!""You must know that we must someday part. Not this soon, I di-.. I didn't expect. Ugh! But I'll have you know that the days spent with you were among the happiest moments of this old man's life gahk!"His breaths began to become shallower and more labored."Gramps, that's enough!" She turned towards me again. "PLEASE!"I flicked open the outer casing for my VR headset, allowing Monika's cameras to truly look at the world without hindrance. "Monika, Diagnosis please," I requested, no longer bothering to maintain secrecy.I put my hand lightly around the wound, my fingers like a cage over the bloody tear in his chest./"Amplify: Ultrasound,/" Monika murmured. I sent a wordless weak vibrating wave of Wind down from my palm and around my fingertips, and she analyzed the returns. Then through localized magnetic field shenanigans, build up a resonant image.She displayed a view on the insides, the metal of the arrowhead highlighted. The shaft was broken off close to the head and bent a little to the side. It was too deep to just dig out with our fingers, we'd need forceps and scalpels to widen the wound."That's really lodged in there. Why is the arrowhead snapped off? Who did this?"" I was I was trying to pull the arrow out, but Grampy Leim broke it instead," the girl replied, still sniffing. The guards recoiled.I nodded slowly. "Yeah. That's bad. Don't ever pull out an arrow or a knife until you're sure you can stop the bleeding. Most times it's the metal in there that's keeping the blood in.""So this is my fault!" Sushie cried. "I'm sorry! Please don't die, Grampy Reim!""Don't blame yourself your innocence is a precious gift." His eyes began to droop. "I am sorry""Don't you give up just yet, butler man!" I hissed out. I looked up and barked out "I need a clean cloth to staunch the wound!""May we pull down the carriage curtains?" one of the soldiers asked."Don't ask me stupid things!" the girl shrieked. "Save Grampy Reim!"They began ripping out the curtains and handed me the green cloth. I hesitated one last time. I had never really done this before. Why in the world would I even have paramedic training?!/"We need to apply direct pressure to staunch the wound, but that risks driving the arrowhead even deeper."/"I guess we'll just have to risk it!" I replied. "Come, Water!, Come, Fire!" I sterilized my hands with steam. Then the same to the curtains.Linze slid next to me and I handed her half of the linens. Over her wrists, because unlike her twin sister her didn't wear full gloves. She winced, as the curtains were still piping-hot, if not unbearably so. The remaining sanitized curtains were held by Maldon.Then I ripped open the old man's shirt to expose the wound. The little girl screamed at seeing the ragged flesh, and we could all see blood pumping out with every breath. Pieces of a broken-off arrow shaft poked out of his chest.With both hands I pinched either side of the wound shut and bid Linze to cover it with the folded fabric. "Put pressure on this wound!""You- you're just going to leave the arrow in there?" Linze asked. "But he's still bleeding. If we could Heal him now we would" her voice trailed off at the realization, "need to cut out the arrow later.""Most important thing right now is simply to stabilize his condition. We need to make him survive the next five minutes!""But what if I put too much pressure and push the arrow too deep?!""The metal itself will seal the cut! The most important is to stop the blood from flowing!" I grimaced. "Linze! I can't keep my hands here forever!""All right!" she replied firmly. And then she folded over the linens and pressed it onto the wound. Slowly I eased the pressure off and let go. Then I pointed to the remaining length of fabric."We need to bind his chest! Tight!""I will do it!" Yae interjected. "Please help sit him up. I have done this sort of wound binding before."So while Maldon helped sit the limp old butler to a slightly sitting position, Yae reached over to wind the cloth around his chest and over Linze's hands. Linze slowly slid one palm out, and Yae pulled tight to wind around, two more times. And then gingerly the other hand, to complete pressuring the blood seal."Come, Light! Sun's purifying touch, Sterilizing Ray!" I flashed over the wound.The little girl hiccupped in distress, "Gramps! He's not breathing?! GRAAMPS WAKE UP!""Monika! Diagnosis?!"/"His lungs are filling up with blood. That's why it's getting harder to breathe. It's not the blood loss that's killing him, it's going into shock and the lack of air!"/I shifted my right hand into two pointing fingers, index and middle finger, almost like a pistol gesture. I pressed the tips of my fingers onto his side, between the ribs, and chanted "Come, Wind! Life-giving breath, Resuscitation!"His empty left lung expanded, causing the old butler to wince and gasp out in pain. His chest deflated, and again I repeated the Resuscitation chant."Haaah. Hah...!" a gasp escaped his slack lips."Gramps?!""Lady Sushie?""He's alive!" the guards cried out.I nodded slowly. "Um little girl? Sushie?" Pronounced more like 'Susie' than 'Sushi', but with a distinct 'ch' sound near the end. "It's okay, go touch his face. Warm him up with your hands. Keep him awake!"The girl did so. "Gramps! Please stay awake! Can you hear me? Please! Can you can you feel this?!""I feel a little less close to death's door" Reim said softly. "Aahh." His eyes opened slowly, and he began to blink. "What what is this feeling?""You're making him breathe from the outside!" one of the guards muttered. "That's amazing!""Blood pressure low! Body temperature still lowering!"That clear-headedness was only due to the brain being feed fresh oxygen. I grit my teeth. "Light, come forth! Life's brilliant rubies! Blood Maker!" I pressed the fingers of my other hand to his neck to take over "Water, come! Attend life's flows! Blood Bend!"/" Heartbeat stabilizing. Player, what did you do?"/"I'm rechanneling oxygenated blood flow from the heart to the lungs," I answered. "All the heart does is supply blood to the brain if we can keep the brain alive, the person survives until the heart can restart.""You can do that?!" the little girl gasped.Linze stared at me wide-eyed. "That's that's honestly amazing, Mister Zah. I have Light magic too, but I never heard of that spell!""It's not a spell, this is just how the body works. Air energizes blood, sends it to brain and other organs, air-less blood cycles back through the veins to be pumped by the heart collecting air from the lungs. Breathing is what's important stale blood kills.""Everything comes from breath, all power comes from breath" Yae murmured./"Actually I'm quite sure that's an original spell. I wonder if other people find it as easy as you to invent original spells? This whole 'Identify Element + Define Action + Speak Spell Name' system is so flexible like auto-approved prayers to redefine reality, it can't be that simple."/Monika smirked slightly. /"I somewhat envy that you can do these targeted spells just because magic obeys intent more readily than it does ordered laws."/"Yeah, you go ahead and do that, /Mistress of Infinite Stacking/.""Is is Gramps going to live?" the girl asked. "I mean you can't keep your fingers doing that forever, right? And who is that no, that's not important right now" She put her hands together and pleaded shaking them towards me, "Please! Will he be okay?!""Depends on the tightness of the bindings. We're just waiting for his blood to clot."" what's that?""When the body is wounded, the blood hardens after a while to seal the wound. If you've ever been cut, it's why if you keep pressure on the wound it seems to stop bleeding after a while and then begins to heal. Living blood dissolves the blood clot and starts the veins flowing again if the blood could flow away without leaking."You may not realize it, but the body is actually plenty smart about protecting itself from damage the human body is surprisingly robust compared to other animals, even if we look weaker. If we can just seal a wound in time, we can survive A LOT of damage that would kill large predators.""I don't know this. I've never been cut," she admitted sadly. "I was only trying to help, but I made things worse. I should have known this! I should I should know this."We sat there in that strange pose for a few more minutes, with the little girl pressing her palms to the old man's cheeks while I was stabbing my fingers into his ribs and neck. We waited to see if he would bleed out and die, even until our arms began to ache.--
