When I came back to myself, I was partially buried in a mound of sand, my head pounding and my ears still ringing. For a few moments, I was just lying there, my head twisted to the side so I could breathe without getting my mouth full of gritty sand, trying to ascertain I still had all my limbs and my mind remained mostly intact. Then, once I was confident my body wasn't about to shut down on me, I started to stretch my senses outwards, to check if the rest of the world was still there, after the massive explosion I vaguely remembered.

The checking involved extracting my aching limbs from the mountain of sand the explosion had spread across me, while noticing how many larger pieces of rock and ice had been held back by wooden barricades conjured by Luna. Without those barricades, I wasn't sure I would have fared as well as I had; there were quite a few large pieces stuck deeply in the wood. Some had even managed to penetrate the cover entirely, shards as long as my arms sticking out of the wooden wall as an ominous reminder of the violence we had just managed to avoid. In a few other places, the wall was entirely shredded, making me think that Luna had reinforced the places we were hiding behind with extra care, or maybe I had just been lucky.

Whatever the case, I stretched out my Astral Power, looking for my companions. I felt strangely blind, the constructs I usually used to expand my range all gone. I would have to conjure them up again later. At the same time, I was trying to estimate how much Astral Power I had during the last moments of the fight and judge how long I had been out from that. It was a fairly difficult challenge as I had thrown myself into making the trench we had taken shelter in, but with an estimate of my condition at that time and the knowledge of how fast my Astral Power regenerated normally, I could tell that I had been out for about five minutes. Maybe ten, if I had pushed more Astral Power into creating the trench or had used some of my magic to keep the explosion off us, it was hard to tell. And, ultimately, it didn't really matter; my current estimation was good enough, so I wouldn't spend any additional time thinking about this.

Instead, I focused on my surroundings, especially the two lumps partially buried nearby. Looking at the larger one, a spike of fear shot through my gut. One of the shards of stone had managed to pierce through the cover we had created and pierced into the form lying in the dirt. After shooting Luna's form a quick glance, just to make sure she wasn't hurt, too and had just been knocked out by the explosion, I focused on Lia.

The shard I had noticed had pierced through our wooden cover and dug itself deeply into Lia's shoulder, breaking some of the bones, shredding sinews and rending flesh. Luckily, it was still stuck in her shoulder, blocking the numerous blood vessels from leaking too much, so she hadn't lost all that much blood.

Closing my eyes to focus my mind, I started to heal the damage, focusing on making sure she wouldn't come to more harm by accident. And wouldn't bleed out, my Blood Magic was especially good at that, while it was fairly bad when it came to the broken bones. Luna would have to take a look at those. Her ability to mix Divine Magic and Life Magic together gave her a potent set of tools to heal a wide range of damage.

"What hit us?" Luna's voice came from behind me as I was just finishing up Lia's initial treatment.

"I think the spirit exploded," I admitted, not completely sure just how that had happened. Somehow, the alterations and the chaotic magic I had infused into the spirit's efforts, maybe even into the spirit itself, had caused some sort of catastrophic failure, resulting in the cataclysmic explosion that had ravaged the valley.

And calling the valley ravaged was fairly apt. It had been desolate before the fight, the ground barren rock with nary a plant in sight and a glacier pushing downwards at the end with the salty lake sitting off to the side, but now, the entire thing was a parking lot. Everything but Luna's wooden cover had been flattened, with a few shards of rock sticking out of the ground like spears or spikes. Even the walls of the valley, some five hundred metres away, had partially collapsed, altering the topography of this area even further. The pond I had used was quite a bit smaller, with tons of water simply gone, and its sides broken and fallen inward.

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My eyes were drawn to a pair of distant figures, Silva and Sasha. They had supposedly been outside of the guardian's range, but with the brutal violence of its final detonation, that had gone right out of the window. Something about the two distant figures looked wrong to my eyes, but I couldn't put my finger on what; my mind was a little too wobbly.

"Can you take care of Lia?" I asked Luna, after using my magic to remove the sand that was burying her and pulling her to her feet.

"Yeah, I've got sis," she replied, her voice a little hoarse, but it didn't look like she had been seriously injured. Perhaps some bruises or damage from the overpressure, but nothing critical. Something I wasn't confident saying about our two furry companions.

So, while Luna made sure the damage left after my first aid was on its way to healing, I climbed out of the trench, shakily making my way across the broken ground towards our friends. Just walking was a challenge, my body felt a little wobbly, and the ground covered in broken rock, sand and ice didn't make this easier. It was almost amusing. This might be one of the few explosions that spread around ice instead of melting it; the entire energy in this one had gone into movement, without any heat generated due to the elements involved.

Which might have made this all a little worse. Without heat taking up energy, everything had gone into movement, causing the stone and ice of the spirit's whirlwind to get launched outwards with insane force, ripping the air itself with them as they moved. A completely different physical mechanism from a normal explosion, but just as devastating.

My mind snapped back into focus when I realised what was wrong with the figures. They looked broken, as if a giant had taken them and tossed them aside carelessly, leaving them to fall and land where they may.

Forcing my mind into a semblance of order, I focused on the task at hand, making my way across the broken ground as swiftly as possible. The closer I got, the better I could see the two figures and the more details I was able to pick out. Neither of them looked good, though Sasha looked arguably worse, likely because she still had a lower level and lacked the fairly insane traits or blessings the rest of us had to make us even stronger. Sasha was, in comparison, just another beast in an area filled with them, a little higher in level than she originally had been but not that powerful. It looked like Silva had tried to shield our younger companion but hadn't been completely successful, or maybe it had just been bad luck.

When I got to them, my heart fell. Silva, being up front, had taken severe damage. Her fur was already matted with blood and her head lolled around, eyes flickering open for a moment before falling shut again. Touching her, I immediately started to apply first aid, making sure that the damage wouldn't get worse and she could survive. It took a minute, maybe two, just to make sure her body wouldn't fail her all of a sudden, and then, once I was done with her, I stepped over to Sasha.

And my face immediately fell. Sasha's body wasn't moving. Not at all, no twitches, no movement of her chest due to her breathing, even her wounds were barely bleeding, just a bit of blood oozing out of them and following gravity. Touching her body, despite knowing what I would find, only confirmed my fears.

Her heart wasn't beating, so I tried my best to start moving her blood around with my magic, reaching out into the furthest reaches of her body as I was starting to fix things. And there were a lot of things to fix. Shards of stone had lacerated her skin, the overpressure of the explosion had done severe damage to her lungs, getting thrown around had broken bones, and her brain had been thoroughly concussed. Numerous veins had burst and blood had leaked into her flesh everywhere, especially in her brain.

But I had to try. Despite everything my intuition and magic told me, I had to try. Despite knowing that what I was doing might be pointless, despite the amount of power it took to move around blood without any innate vitality in it, despite everything.

I tried.

Despite knowing that what I was doing was futile. I tried. And failed.

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