Divinity Rescue Corps
151- The Question of Anesthetics

It’s worth remembering two things going forward: one, Blake and a dozen of his Guardians had instilled within me a deep distrust of any Guardians that weren’t my people. They had put others in danger with the specific intent to try to ‘save’ them just for a few experience points. Leveling up was more important to them than the lives of their people. Two, I had used my new extended range Psyspeech so much to alert my mom to the situation here that using it for the rest of the day simply wasn’t possible.

I rolled my shoulders and stepped further into the dark and quite warm water. Huge swampy trees, like twisted cousins of the boogie trees, were hanging over the water and obscuring most of the sunlight. Instead of gigantic spherical leaves, these ones looked to have long willow-like leaves that hung down from branches looking an awful lot like gnarled arms. The chill and dopey smiley faces on the boogie trees were nowhere to be found. These ones looked to have eyebrows and mouths drawn into flat lines or slight frowns. There were creases in between the eyebrows of some of them, and a few appeared morose, with bags under their eyes. It wasn’t menacing, but it was off-putting. The world I’d seen so far was bright and alive with cheerful magic coursing through it. This place seemed to instead ooze its magic.

“Fletcher!”

I turned, to find Jacoby staring at me in horror. The two Guardians were growing to huge size and still towered, only up to their chests now. They had the disgusted look of people in a bathtub full of slugs or leeches.

“You’re just… going to… go in the water like that?”

“I have water breathing,” I told her. And a poison ward. And complete immunity from poison aspect damage.

“I’m coming,” she said, and started pulling off her knee high boots, her socks, her skin tight dark gray traveling pants, but stopped when the white panties with the tiny red hearts appeared. She looked up at me, already blushing.

“It’s all right,” I told her. “I know what I’m doing.” The fact that I did not know what I was doing wasn’t relevant.

“No no!” She shoved her pants off and revealed miles of toned, sleek thighs. The top came off next, revealing a training bra rather than matching tiny red hearts on white. I had to admit, she looked great. Not Cinzy great, but close. The toned abs and compact form were tough to look away from.

She was in up to her neck, dunking herself under, and showing off her wet hair a moment later.

“I can breathe under water,” I protested. “You can’t.”

“You’re the only Healer. I’m just a Ranger.” If she was trying to argue that she was expendable, it wasn’t working. She was the expedition leader.

I sighed. “All right… just follow my lead.”

Two factors allowed me to see anything beneath the surface of the muddy swamp water. One was Eagle Eyed, the ability Tara had leant me.

Eagle Eyed IV

(Special Ability, Common, passive)

I- Your eyesight and hearing become better than human. You are able to discern details at a distance, and analyze close objects much better than base humans.

II- Your peripheral vision and reactions are increased beyond human maximums. You may not be caught off guard.

IV- You may peer into visible bands that are otherwise impossible for humans to discern. This requires focusing.

Not only could I see better than actual eagles, I could see nearly as well as a freaking mantis shrimp. Those things had triple vision eyeballs. I had experimented with the level 4 ability and found it disorientating. My Affinity helped me handle the sight of ultraviolet, infrared, and then seeing the flow of mana. It is literally impossible to describe the sensations to people who can’t see beyond what they can’t see, but I will say that seeing heat sources and I could only do one at a time though. In this case, mana sources.

A lot of them, I was surprised to find. A lot of tiny collections of blue-violet mana darted here or there, or hid under rocks, or were the rocks. The whole world glowed with an undertone of that same color, though the concentrations made them glow brighter. I got the general shape of them: a bunch of minnows swirling around us, a large snapping turtle over that way, small crustaceans there and there and there, a snake slithering through the water away… and then the Injecticle.

It was humanoid.

I paused and backtracked a little, so my head was above the waterline.

“I can see it… its leg is trapped by rocks.”

Jacoby, thoroughly soaked and looking amazing, made her displeasure instantly known. “All Guardians, out of the water right now! Form up!”

“I’m going to pry it free,” I told her.

“Don’t. It’ll attack you. My danger sense has been spiking ever since you got in the water. I’ll get these chuckleheads to do it.” She turned to where all the Guardians had assembled and stood at attention, even the two huge ones. “Who was throwing boulders when we got in here, huh? Which of you people disobeyed my direct orders?”

I just turned and ducked back under the water.

The creature did not want me to get close, that much was clear the moment I began to move towards its trapped leg. Now, with my mana sense active using Eagle Eyed, I only really saw its chakra points and mana channels, so there was no way to tell exactly what I was looking at. It was murky water with the occasional flash of purple tentacles. These ones had yellow suckers and each one of those suckers had a tiny needle for injecting the paralytic toxin.

It would’ve been far more terrifying if I hadn’t had any of the resistances or immunities that I had, but it still freaked me out a little. I swam down, hoping that maybe the tentacles from the top of the creature couldn’t reach all the way down to its legs or trapped foot, but that hope was soon dashed. Down there, the tentacles started stinging me repeatedly. The UI started throwing alerts at me in rapid succession, so rapid in fact that I couldn’t read them.

You’ve been stung by an Injecticle! You’ve taken minor damage and are bleeding. Healer’s Resistance has rendered you immune to poison aspect sources. You have not been infected by Injecticle neurotoxin.

You’ve been stung by an Injecticle! You’ve successfully resisted the physical damage and reduced it by half. You have not been infected—

You’ve been stung by an Injecticle! You have taken—

You’ve been stung by an Injecticle!

You’ve been stung—

Shoving the alerts aside and mentally commanding the UI stop throwing them up in my face, I tried to concentrate past the pain and get down to the task at hand. Since I’d been in pain for a good half my life, starting in middle school, that wasn’t hard. I’d been pushing past and ignoring and heading to the bathroom to have a frustrated cry for about a decade now, and it was only in the last six months that wasn’t a part of my reality anymore.

I grabbed onto the rock, trying to ignore the many tiny wounds that were being inflicted. Again, since I didn’t have any bodybuilder skills, such as, I don’t know, Lift Heavy Object, the system defaulted to Muscularity. In short order I was asked if I wanted to spend 5 Tokens to succeed automatically. Five seemed like an absolute ton, but—

You’ve been grappled by an Injecticle! You’ve taken 8 instances of minor damage. Your physical damage resistance has helped to halve the damage from 3 of those instances.

Tentacles wrapped around my left arm, upper arm and wrist, and started biting in again and again all the way around. The muscles in the tentacles pulsed rhythmically so the little needles could be drawn out and then plunged back down again in rapid order. I had to say, it hurt like heck. I was very glad my job had required the use of needles almost never.

I spent the 5 Tokens… nope, the difficulty jumped up again, and I was forced to spend 7 Tokens instead. Without a moment’s hesitation this time, I spent the Tokens. A flurry of them appeared around my head, flashing gold in the deep murk of the water, before dissipating into flashes of glittery mana.

I heaved even before my muscles bulged with the investiture of all the mana. The needle jabs, which weren’t draining my hit points nearly as fast as I thought they might, faltered for a second before resuming.

I’d never used Muscularity Tokens at all before, since they were a new thing. Even when they were Physicality Tokens I’d never used so many at once anyway. The coins themselves, some three inches across and a half inch thick, reminded me of the chunky pieces of eight from the movie about the pirates trying to cheat death. They were molded with the same image as the Physicality Tokens had been, the figure flexing both arms with bulging biceps and defined shoulder and back muscles.

The feeling I got from it was intoxicating. I felt the power of Atlas inside me. I was invincible. Nothing could stop me, or even slow me down.

Well, the flashing readout telling me I was at two thirds of my maximum hit points was a sobering reminder that I was not actually a god.

Heaving with all my enhanced might, I heard a shriek of pain and the rumbling of stone. The rock shifted, then shifted more. Trent could’ve snapped his fingers and had this situation dealt with no problem.

Instead I took jab after jab from an confused, cornered creature that didn’t know my intentions. Finally though, I shoved the rock aside and its leg came free.

Now I braced my feet against the next rock below, and shoved off with all my enhanced strength. The Tokens never lasted long, only about thirty seconds generally, and I wanted to get away from the needling right this very moment.

I pulled the Injecticle along with me for only a food or so before the tentacles around my arm let go. With a few more kicks, I breached the surface.

There may have been some screaming, but I didn’t bother with it. Instead I started doing the backstroke until hands jerked me out of the swampy water and up onto land.

Amidst the chaos of the rescue effort, Jacoby and her people freaking out over the tiny puncture wounds and the blood, I peered back to where the tentacles had been thrashing, and found a pair of glowing yellow eyes just above the water, staring at me.

***

It only took a quick healing potion to handle the wounds from the Injecticle, but I was the only person who could make it. Also, Larelle’s glorious blob of fiery laziness was back with Regina and my mother. I had to wait for the fire to be the right temperature, have the Wizards adjust the height of the cauldron, and get the correct water temperature before adding in the necessary healing herbs. After that, it was time for the mana infusion and the stirring.

“Oh stop it,” I grumbled. “I’m fine.”

“Have you looked at your arm?” Jacoby shrieked. “You look like you just got into a fight with a giant squid! Don’t ever—”

I held up my good hand before stirring again. “I won’t have that problem… I successfully freed it.”

She slapped me on the shoulder without rings of suction cup hickeys or dozens of puncture wounds. “And another thing, the Guardians have higher Durability than you for this very, fracking, reason!” She punctuated the last three words with more half-hearted slaps. “They have more hit points, better resistances—”

I doubted that.

“And abilities that protect them from this kind of nonsense.”

I just sighed. Blake’s people gave me a pretty dim view of any Guardian that wasn’t Chrysta, Larelle, Ivy or Isabelle. I had some stuff to work through in order to start trusting unknown Guardians ever again.

“Did you speak to it?” I asked, and realized then I could have, and should have, linked to it with my Psyspeech. It was then I also realized that wouldn’t have been possible regardless. The last one I’d sent long distance to my mother was already high difficulty. I wasn’t about to spend more Tokens on this.

“Speak to what? That monster vanished into the swamp. We’re trying to get a bead on it with the Wizards, but there’s so much life around here that it’s probably not going to work. It’s gone. This was all for nothing.”

“Nah,” I said. “Its leg was stuck. It’s free. That’s not nothing.”

She narrowed her eyes at me. “You really mean that, don’t you?”

“What?”

“Nothing.” She got up, a towel around her waist, and headed to her tent to get changed into dry clothes.

By the time late afternoon rolled around, I had mature plants. All of them, I thought, barring the halo sage and henge grass splice, were too potent for my needs. Henge sage, the imaginative name for the plant, ended up cut, replanted, and tended so I could have enough to work up a cure for the following day. Once again, I found myself amazed that when I needed gardening shears, they simply appeared on my person. When I needed a small spade for replanting the henge sage, that was at hand as well. The God of Productivity hadn’t been messing around with His gift.

I spent the rest of the evening drying out the remaining henge sage, along with cuttings over the other plants I wasn’t likely to use. All three bamboos and all three lotuses gave off far too much divine healing power. The other sages had a chance, though they were quite potent on the mana.

Once all the chores were taken care of, I joined the others around the fire and updated everybody on the progress thus far, and what I expected from the next few days. Yes, I told them, I knew that the flower fox had only another five days and I was shaving things close.

When asked if I could make this process go any faster, I replied that I could not. It would go as it would. Once more, just like with the God of Productivity, I reminded Jacoby’s people that healing in this world was a lot like on earth, but with faster results. Savannah, the ever-pleasant expedition Bard, cheerfully soothed everybody’s nerves with a high level social check that wasn’t directed my way. I gave her a warm smile in return.

Also, just like the cure with the God of Productivity, I was going to need to work this into a salve or unguent, and spread it onto the creature’s chakra points. I had no wish to try to get at a fighting aspect creature’s taint, let alone its belly, heart, throat, forehead or crown. Doing this sort of procedure on a creature under duress wasn’t ideal, obviously.

This is Christopher peering out toward the large swampy pond and sighing in disappointment.