The battle high died down, and rational thought and emotion took charge of Kurt's mind once again.
His hands were trembling, and so was his jaw. His gaze darted towards his sword, stained not by the blue blood of a familiar, or the black blood of a dragon, but the red blood of a human. On the floor, the woman's gurgling whimpering stopped, and Kurt realized what this meant with painful clarity.
He looked to the side, to the unmoving bodies of Mila and Conrad.
No, he thought, this can't be happening. It can't.
He felt the pressure on his aether lift, the ward that constrained it gone along its creator. This last sensory input was the one to unclog his mind, the proverbial straw on the camel's back.
All strength seemed to abandon his body, and he fell to his knees. The blood of the warlock stained his pants, but he didn't notice.
Conrad and Mila...
He began hyperventilating, the full scope of what had happened hitting him all at once. Silver Demon escaped his weakening grip, and fell onto the still growing puddle of blood with a splat. Kurt grabbed onto his head, as if trying to keep it from breaking into tiny pieces, and clenched his teeth until he felt his temples rattle, and his vision blurry.
And yet somehow, despite his wrists covering his ears and his own heartbeat resonating in his ears, he heard something: A groan, coming from the other side of the room.
And then, her voice called for him.
Mila's voice.
"Kurt?" She called. Her voice sounded weak and slurry, but it was her voice. "Help... please..."
He hurried to them as fast as he could.
He realized something when he got close enough.
They were alive. The both of them..
Only Mila was conscious, looking at him with a pained and tired expression, but from this close he could see Conrad's back, and how it was rising and lowering rythmically. In sync with his breathing.
"What... What happened?!" He stammered. It was a stupid question to make, Kurt realized, but he wasn't thinking clearly.
Mila groaned. It must have been difficult for her to breathe with Conrad's body atop hers. He resisted the urge of moving him, knowing that he would be risking hurting him even further no matter how careful he tried to be.
"That... woman..." she said between coughs. "A purple light enveloped her right knee and, before I knew what was happening..." She trailed off.
"I can guess." He reasured her. The warlock had used Mila's makeshift torniquet, a vine charged with Primeval magic, as a foci. It was obviously quite far from an ideal tool for her sorcery, not helped by the fact she was 'wielding it' with her leg, which was probably the reason her spell had been weak enough that they could survive it. When Kurt had arrived, she panicked, which caused her to try and use the vine as a foci instead of conjuring a Tighearnais. And then...
No! he thought, It's not time for that.
"Conrad, he... reacted first." She said. "He jumped between her and me and..." She looked at Conrad's charred back. "He took the worst of it."
Kurt saw her lower lip beguin to quiver. "It's okay, it's okay." he said, softly placing a hand in her forehead.
But it wasn't okay. Mila seemed mostly unharmed, but Conrad...his wounds were bad: The skin on his back as burnt as it could, with entire sections of it pretty much gone, and the exposed muscle was wounded enough that Kurt could catch glimses of the bone beneath it..
He breathed deeply, trying to calm himself. "We gotta take you to the hospital. Now"
"What? Can't you... call an ambulance?"
"Phone doesn't work." He explained, turning to look at Conrad's unconscious form "And we don't have time to find one that does. I just have to... find a way of moving him safely."
Just picking him up was not an option. They had first aid courses back at the order, which were obligatory to take for anyone participating in any sort of quest that could involve bodily harm, and the first thing that taught them in those courses was not to manhandle someone that was wounded, least you just hurt them further. So, with physically carrying Conrad out of the picture, Kurt had only his sorcery to rely on. Fire was immediatly ruled out, but perhaps he could do something with transfiguration. Wind sorcery wouldn't yield any better results than carrying Conrad would, it was just to volatile and insubstantial too consider.
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But... if the main problem with wind sorcery was a lack of solidity, didn't he already have something that could make up for it it?
Conjuring his wand, Kurt stuck it between Conrad and Mila, and began pumping wind-aligned AP from it. It wasn't anything crazy like what he would use for his combat spells, just a gentle breeze that could barely be even felt, and not something that wold move a human body.
Not by itself, that is.
When the mass of magic infused air had pooled thick enough between and around their bodies, Kurt added the final two pieces that the spell required: Increase Weight and Structural Reinforcement. As soon as the two newest additions to his spell list had been cast, the difused mass of air began trembling. Its edeges became more defined, and its mass began to flow downwards and into itself, condensing before Kurt's eyes. The mass began coiling around Conrad's and Mila's bodies, momentarily threatening with squeezing them until Kurt willed it to-gently- push them atop its form, until they were both lying side by side on their backs in what cushion of solid air.
Wind Sorcery: Air Cushion ( Rank D spell)
The caster conjures a mass of air with vastly amplified density and solidity thanks to the use of both evocation and transfiguration principles.
Volume of air and toughness increase with MND stat, Aetheric Attunement skill rank, Evocation skill rank and AP spent.
With a final twirl of his wand Kurt willed for sections of the cushion to coil around his companions necks and torsos, both to keep them strapped to it and to keep their forms as still as possible.
"Mila, how does it feel? Are the bindings to tight?"
She shook her head slowly. "It's fine, but..." She gestured at Conrad with her head."...should Conrad really be lying on his back?"
"...Damnit" He twirled his wand once again and Conrad's body turned until his charred back was facing upwards. Another twirl and the section of the cushion Conrad's head was resting in concaved slightly at the center, so that his nose and mouth weren't pressed directly against it. "Thanks for the tip, I'm... still not thinking as clearly as I should."
"It's fine." She reasured him with a wave of her hand and a tired smile. "We'd be a lot worse off without you, a couple mistakes aren't gonna change that."
Kurt nodded and, after picking his blood soaked sword from the floor and storing it in his inventory- He could clean it later, and mithril didn't rust or hold dirt either way-, he grabbed onto the cushion and began dragging it. The texture was strange, feeling both very soft and solid, and Kurt noted with satisfaction how none of the movements it was experiencing seemed to actually reach neither Conrad nor Mila. The spell was very stable and supplied with a surplus of SP, as much as Kurt could pour onto it without destabilizing it, and its nature as an homogeneous mass of solidified air meant that the odds of it 'popping' were slim, so he didn't need to worry about being gentle when handling it.
The front door stood on Kurt's way, closed and to narrow for the cushion to pass through it without squeezing through, which wasn't an option guiven what it was carrying. Without missing a beat, Kurt conjured his wand onto his free hand, and enveloped it in a mass of wind sorcery.
Boom! A Jet Bullet crashed onto and through the door, obliterating it alongside the walls around it, which created a hole big enough for the cushion to pass through unimpeded. Once they were in the front yard Kurt pointed the wand behind, and lugged a Fireball at the building. The spell crashed through a window and exploded with a mutted boom, and smoke began pouring out the building.
Good, Kurt thougt, Let the flames erase that place.
It wasn't like there was anything there that could be useful for anyone. The group had already scouted the whole of it, and the only piece of useful information, the warlock's notebook, was stored safely in Kurt's inventory.
Kurt settled his gaze towards the town: He didn't know anything about this place, like where the hospital was, so his best bet was blasting towards the center of it and hope that he could see the building from there. So he ran, reinforcing his body to its limit and dragging his friends behind. They blasted through the dirt roads that connected the outskirts with the main town, and continued moving even faster when Kurt's feet felt the familiar soldity of asphalt beneath their soles.
He saw people at either side of the road barely paying attention at them. Kurt didn't know what was that the Curse of the Veil made them see in lieu of a child covered in Od-flares dragging a cushion of solidified air. The curse was a powerful thing that could twist human perception to whatever extreme was necessary to keep the narrative of the world being a normal, boring place and magic being nothing but a fabrication. As many times as Kurt had been irritated by it, by having to move in the shadows and lie about or censor pretty much every aspect of his life when talking to a regular person, as if his actions of slaying monsters and saving lives were somehow morally reprehensible, he was now thankful for it. God knew he didn't need people gawking at them, or even trying to stop them.
An ambulance with its siren at full blast passed in front him at an intersection, coming from the street to his right, a firetruck soon followed it. Kurt realized that they were probably heading towards he warlock's lair. The Curse of the Veil covered anything blatantly supernatural, like displays of sorcery or supernatural creatures, but even if the cause of a fire was magical, a house on fire was a house on fire. The Curse would probably only kick in when they tried to determine the origin of the fire.
Well, at least now he had a clue of where the hospital was.
He kept running through the streets for what couldn't have been more than five minutes before he finally saw the building: A plain white, three story tall building marked with a capital red 'H' on its surface, and about half a dozen ambulances parked in front of it.
He had reached the front entrance of the building before he realized something: He didn't have any idea on what to tell the hospital's staff. How was he supposed to come up with a mundane explanation for this? With Mila, who only seemed to have minor wounds at worst, he could come up with something simple, like a peeled wire she had grazed by accident. But Conrad? How was he supposed to explain Conrad's wounds?
He couldn't. There was just no mundane explanation for it that would sound plaussible. The only way for them to get the medical attention they needed without any questions asked would be... if there wasn't any one they could interrogate.
"Mila." He called, crouching beside the cushion so that their faces were closer. "We can't have them interrogating us about what happened to you guys, so I need you to pretend to be unconscious, or to delirious to be talked to. Can you do that?"
"Sure, but... what about you?" she said. "Won't they ask you about it?"
"No, because..." He took a deep breath. "... because I won't be here for them to interrogate. I'll leave you guys here for them to find, and try to sneak into the building without anyone seeing me."
Kurt expected Mila to object to the plan, to express some sort of doubt about it, or fear at being left alone in such a harrowing scenario as being dropped at the front door of an hospital was. But if she felt any of this, she had made an excelent job at hiding it, instead just nodding her head at him with a determined expression.
With a mere gesture of his wand, Kurt ordered the Air Cushion to slowly deflate, causing Conrad's and Mila's form to gently land on the pavement of the street. Kurt reached for Conrad's saber, and stored it in his inventory. They couldn't afford for the hospital's staff to take it from him, since the curse wouldn't keep them from seeing it as a sword (It would probably just make the blade look as if it were made of steel instead of the unnaturally clean silvery ore that was mithril), and store it some place they couldn't retrieve it from without making one hell of a scene.
With his companions looking about as normal as they could given the circumstances, Kurt directed his attention towards the building's entrance. No one had paid any attention to them because of the Curse of the Veil, but now that Kurt had dispelled the Air Cushion and wasn't making stuff disappear it wouldn't be long until that protection went away.
It was when he saw a group of M.D's rushed at the building's glass doors with two stretchers in tow, their steps directed at the group, that Kurt knew he had to run.
