ENF Academy: For Some Reason, She Can Only Save the World if She’s Naked

Ch. 1.19: Vitalist

“Damnit, Elaina!” Carline said, tears running down her face, her new friend’s unconscious body lying in her lap. “I’m sorry— I thought…” She’d thought she could take down the starhounds alone by messing with their circulatory systems, like she’d practiced with elk and bears before coming to Endrin. It should have worked, but it didn’t. These aren’t animals though; they’re monsters. If she’d thought about it for even a moment she would have realized, known that a starhound of all things would of course have some resistance to external aspects, the same resistance or more than an Aspected human would. “So stupid… This is why you don’t speak up, why you don’t make plans. Should have just let her come up with something from the start.” 

She poured her mana back into Elaina, the little bit that had recharged in the seconds since she’d last tried to heal her. Carline’s own arm hurt too, where the monster’s mane had grazed it in the fight, but that was just a surface wound. Elaina had the stuff drip on her continuously, burrow through her skin completely. And now it’s inside of her, coursing through her veins. 

Carline could sense Elaina, everything about her, as long as it related to [Health]. The smoke wasn’t a poison, not exactly. It was a corrosive, eating away at the inside of her, Carline desperately healing the parts it was attacking. And since it wasn’t poison, wasn’t illness, there was nothing more she could do. Those things the body had ways of fighting, measures Carline could bolster to heal faster, but this she could only manage the symptoms of, racing against the destruction of Elaina’s body with her depleted, slowly refilling mana pool. It was a race she was losing. Elaina writhed, unconscious, but clearly suffering. “Fuck!” Carline screamed, a word that had never come out of her mouth before. 

She placed her hands on Elaina’s shoulders again, preparing to heal her once more. The staff the system had given did help her focus her aspect at range a bit, but physical contact was still the most efficient. She couldn’t bring herself to do it though, to pour any more into her partner that was still letting out cries of agony. Am I just prolonging her pain? I’m not healing faster than this stuff hurts her anyways.

Elaina had protected her, given her time to think, taken down the last creature with sheer force despite being frozen in place by her own skill. She’d even had to drop the skill to dodge the one Carline was supposed to take care of. All those years practicing with a spear, all that training, all the suffering she’d endured during it, and it still hadn’t been enough. So useless. Elaina had trusted Carline, and now Carline was going to let her die.

“No,” Carline said, wiping tears from her eyes. “I’m not letting you die!” There had to be something she could do. If she’d had more time training before she came to the academy, she knew she’d be able to do it, but she’d only found out what her aspect actually was three months ago, and her parents had only been able to arrange medical training for the last two. There was still so much about the body that she didn’t know, so much more she’d have to learn at Endrin before she’d be able to do everything she needed to do. Still, she couldn’t give up.

Raw healing was out. She had to get the shadows, the invaders out of Elaina’s body somehow. She couldn’t feel them, the same way Elaina’s own body couldn’t feel them, but she could tell where they were by the pain they left in their wake. Four different concentrations throughout Elaina’s bloodstream, flowing through and leaving devastation in their paths. Carline looked at the largest wound on Elaina’s legs, the one just above her right knee, creeping up Elaina’s thigh, which Carline had patched over with a thin scab. She ripped the bottom of her white robes, tearing off a portion of the flap in front of her legs to use as gauze. She’d need it, for what she was about to do.

Carline opened Elaina’s wound back up just as she could feel the smallest mass of pain shooting through Elaina’s leg, increasing her blood pressure by bolstering her heartbeat and constricting her veins, just like she had done to the starhound to make it bleed out faster. Carline couldn’t make wounds appear with her aspect, but messing with them once they were there was doable, and increasing blood flow was trivial. A tiny black worm made of smoke poured out of Elaina’s thigh, trickling down and burning her leg, but mercifully landing on the floor before wriggling in the pool of blood and starting to evaporate. They were a menace inside the body, but once exposed to air, they didn’t last long. Carline let go of her aspect and went to staunch the flow of blood with her makeshift rag. She couldn’t spare the mana to reseal it; it all had to be saved for forcing the things out. 

The waiting was horrific. The things were continuing to eat at Elaina, Elaina’s screams were growing, and Carline couldn’t do anything about it. Eventually, she figured she had enough stored up to try again. She waited for the next biggest mass of pain to run up to the open wound, and Carline pushed again, flooding Elaina’s leg again, once again popping out a disgusting black smoke worm, once again watching the thing fade away.

Carline panted, heaving as she covered the wound again. Mana was its own resource that didn’t normally expend physical energy, but your body didn’t like being completely out of it, so draining it completely, multiple times, still took a toll. She wiped sweat off her brow, pulling her hair back away as well. Two more. Halfway done, but the remaining worms were still doing damage, completely unmitigated. Carline only needed to wait a minute before extracting the next one, which went as cleanly as the previous two, causing superficial burning on the side of Elaina’s leg as it came out, but nothing more serious.

The blood loss was significant though, each larger entity requiring Carline to pump out more of Elaina’s blood to force it out, leaving a terrifying amount of blood on the floor next to Elaina. Only the last one remained though, the largest. Significantly larger, in fact, and also the one that was doing the most internal damage. Carline had thought about removing it first, but that would have meant waiting on enough mana to exorcize it and leaving all four alone in the process. No, this had been the best way, but it still scared her, as the damage it was doing, the pain it was causing, she had to let them go, had to hope it wouldn’t be too late.

Elaina coughed up blood. 

“No,” Carline said, pulling Elaina’s head off her lap and setting it on the ground, turned sideways to reduce the risk of choking. “No!” It had to be now, no matter how much mana she had. But the worm had just passed up the right leg, and she needed to wait for it to go back through the entire body again. Elaina continued to cough up blood, not an obscene amount, but even with meager medical training Carline knew that any amount wasn’t good. The demon inside Elaina made its way round, Carline altering the blood flow to make sure it went down the right artery and back up the right vein; she couldn’t leave it to chance. 

Carline pushed, blood gushing out of the wound as she burned through all of her remaining mana, as she burned through not enough mana. The end of the worm was pushed out, started writhing as it burned in the air the same way it burned Elaina, but it was still inside her, and it started to burrow back into her leg.

“No you don’t!” Carline said, grabbing the thing with the bloodied piece of her robe. The cloth in her hands melted immediately, and she screamed in pain as it burned, seared at her palm, but she pulled anyway. No mana, no way to help herself, she pulled with raw strength, gripping it with her other bare hand once she’d pulled it out enough, yanking it and tossing it away. It flew out the room, into the bright hallway where it squirmed away the last seconds of its damned life.

Elaina was bleeding again. Carline ripped even more off the bottom of her robe, grimacing as she did, her hands in agony as she pulled against the cloth. She shoved it back into place on Elaina’s leg, focusing on the [Health] of her again. The worms were gone, all of them, and completely. “Thank the gods,” Carline said, crying again. 

Once she’d recovered enough mana, she began the slow, slow process of healing Elaina once more, stopping the major internal bleeding first, then moving to the wound Carline herself had reopened on her knee, and then the minor internal injuries. This was routine, stuff that Carline had practiced far more than she would have liked in the last three months. She shook her head, pushing those thoughts of her parents away. 

The surface injuries on Elaina remained even after all the internal ones were healed, but they could wait until there was mana to spare. Carline fell back, panting relentlessly, her palms aching in pain. She brought them up, staring at the wounds. It was more than the minor graze her arm had gotten earlier, but still far less than most of the wounds Elaina still had.

That would be temporary though. [Health] being an external aspect, Carline couldn’t use it on herself. Once she had rested enough, she could heal Elaina completely without tapping out again, Elaina would be perfectly fine, and Carline’s burns would remain. And a thousand times over, it still would have been worth it.

After resting a while, Carline got up, wiping her hands free of blood as gently as she could with the scraps of cloth she still had, wincing at the friction on her raw skin. Once she’d cleaned herself as best she could she tore off even more of her robes, from the back this time, as in her panic she’d already torn the front up to just above her knees, way more than she was normally comfortable with. She wrapped those new scraps around her arms and then finally her palms. She really needed water, soap, disinfectant, something to clean her own wounds and prevent infection, but that could wait. 

She kneeled back down beside Elaina, raising her head up again and resting it on her own now bare thighs as she looked at her. Stars, how had I forgotten… Without the fear of death lingering, without Elaina’s cries of pain ringing through the air, it was impossible not to notice how gorgeous she was, and in that sad excuse for a dress no less. A peaceful, soft face was deep in sleep, her small mouth slightly ajar, long chestnut hair flowing down the side of her head. Her breasts were amazing, not overly huge like Carline knew her own were, but a wonderfully large size, perfect shape, hanging softly as she lay there on her side, threatening to fall out the top of her one garment. Despite those though, her torso was lithe, tapering in above her waist and then extending back out again into her hips and the most beautiful butt Carline had ever seen, a butt that was peeking out just a little from the end of the comically short dress.

Carline, heart pounding harder than she’d made Elaina’s only minutes earlier, looked down to Elaina’s legs, the only part still injured. Even wounded, the long, perfectly shaped legs were attractive, but Carline couldn’t focus on that now. She thought she’d need more time to restore mana, but now with [Viewer Rating] at full power and already having the benefits of [Unseen Watcher], she figured it would be enough. She focused on the last bit of healing, the burnt flesh fading into pink patches of new skin, then that soft, papery skin growing into the gentle pink flush of the rest of Elaina’s body.

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