Two days had passed since the incident in the dungeon event. Galahad proceeded to have four more episodes of screaming and blinding pain when he was at the nearby medical center.
The medical center was a seven-story-tall stone structure that was filled with magician class healers and doctors to treat the people of Teramore and it's injured guests. The more severe ailments and injuries were; the farther down you were located on the lower floors, meaning Galahad and Venora were moved from the first floor and then to the third floor later on. They were no longer in unstable conditions, so they moved up from the critical condition rooms.
Each time Galahad woke up screaming, the nurses and floor aids kept refilling the tube in his mouth with more and more sedatives. They increased it until they reached the point where they could no longer exceed the capacity of drugging him. Otherwise they would have to been giving him potentially lethal doses.
It was a good thing they didn't have to because Galahad woke up the sixth time without screaming in pain.
He woke up to the sound of himself ringing the cuff on his right hand against the bed frame. The nurse he remembered very faintly from the first night came over and spoke at him in a tone almost like the one his old school teachers would use on children..
"Do you know who you are? Where you are? Is the pain still too intense? Okay, good. We've been keeping you medically sedated for a while now, but it tends to slow the mana flow that helps magicians naturally heal. So now I am going to remove the Stem from your stomach, it will be a little uncomfortable. This will be better though, if I can give you medication to take voluntarily, we can do this process much more easy from here on out."
Galahad nodded to confirm his wish of remove the tubing from his mouth. He could feel parts of his mouth were extremely dry and his lips were getting very chapped and cracked. He would have noticed it sooner, if not for the burning pain that constantly ran across his entire left side.
The nurse murmured a command chant out of Galahad's view and he felt a releasing sensation along the inside of his stomach, like his abdomen unclenched after being tight from stress, only this release seemed to be much deeper within.
She came into view again and sprayed water along the inside of Galahad's mouth before slowly pulling the Stem's tube from his jaws.
The motion of the tubing made Galahad feel like a dry eel was pushing its way out of his stomach, making the urge to gag very strong. He was just a second closer to heaving, but the frayed ends at the bottom of Stem exploded from his mouth with dribbles of stomach fluid.
The nurse tossed it into a bucket by the bed with a unmoved expression, she clearly was desensitized with the whole ordeal. Galahad raised his head slightly to see the root like ends that were attached to his stomach lining. He wanted to make a comment about the gross contraption, but all he could do was grimace at the disgusting tastes that now entered his mouth.
"Yeah, you're gonna taste a bit of stomach acid for the rest of the day, the only thing I can recommend is some mints to help." She said while pulling out a tin of mints. She tossed one on Galahad's mouth when he nodded at the option.
He tried moving the rest of his body to sit up, but the pressure of straps across his body was only letting him move a few inches.
"I'm sorry, but the straps are to keep you from harming yourself."
"What?" He hoarsely let out. Everything in his mouth was dry and sore, making his voice sound like sand paper.
"You were tearing at your skin for the first few hours, we had to strap down your body while you were unconscious. If you were left unattended, then you would have probably torn your arm off at the shoulder." She dragged her fingers across her shoulder socket to indicate the cut off mark.
"Oh... well thank you then. I just don't understand what happened. Why was..." Galahad's mind had been muddled for days, like a cloud had been sitting in his brain, depriving him of the last couple days. Now that cloud was starting to dispersed when the drugs were no longer entering his system.
"... Fuck!" He exclaimed. "What happened to the cavern!?! Where is everyone!?! Why- Gahhh!" Galahad tried getting up despite the restraints. All he accomplished was tearing open the wounds he couldn't see.
The nurse held him down and smacked a crystal above the bedframe with her fist. "Kid, I need you to calm down, otherwise I will have to reinsert the stem with more sedatives."
That seemed to bring Galahad back into reality, he stopped hyperventilating and was only tensing in the laying position, trying not to shout.
"Okay good. You've been in the medical center for three days and not cognitively responsive. Now first, let me run a few tests and you need to tell me how you feel. We can figure out everything that happened to your friends after we get this situation dealt with first, got it?"
Galahad nodded silently, he was too busy trying to calm down his breathing through his nose to talk.
"Okay. I'm a nurse here, you can just call me by my name, Pavell." She said while clacking items against one another as Galahad tried to focus his mind on the past.
Galahad tried to shut his eyes and recall the bitter end of his team, but he couldn't remember anything except little fragments of moments. The rest of his memories kept mixing in with dreams of screaming monsters and flashbacks of excruciating pain were mixing in too much with what was once real memories.
He was about to feel absolute despair in his heart, as it was not the first time he would experience it, yet something was holding him back. 'Why can't I feel upset about this?'
'Because I'm forgetting something moron.' He thought in the back of his mind. Then he wondered why his mind had to be rude to itself, there is never a need for name calling.
Galahad's train of thought was broken when the rounded end of a stick was applying pressure to the burns along his neck. Pavell was poking a blunt tool along his injuries, making him grit his teeth in pain.
She picked up on the stifled groans and stopped to explain the reason for inflicting pain.
"Okay, no severe nerve damage. I'll tell you something now, pain is a good thing; it lets you know that something is wrong with you. In this case, it tells us if the burns completely destroyed nerve endings. If you stop feeling the pressure from the wand, let me know."
She ran the tool all across his body and not once did he stop her.
"Huh." She said very questionably to herself.
"What's wrong?"
"Nothing, did the pain ever stop?"
"No, I felt it the entire time. Is that a bad thing?"
"No no, it's just your injuries should have taken away some form of nerves, especially your arm. Your left side took the brunt of the damage, but somehow it's not even decaying. Do you know what did this to you? Magic, acid, or maybe even a hex?"
"No I don't."
"Well you certainly have the strangest of luck. Next we can try one last thing and you can rest."
Nurse Pavell unclasped the cuff on Galahad's right hand and had him grab her wrist.
"You are registered as a support mage with mana tethers in particular. Can you conjure a mana tether?"
Galahad let the mana in his body flow towards Pavell. A tether at such close proximity should have been no problem a week ago, but Galahad really had to try in order to make it connect with Pavell's soul. Once he connected, his mind could sense her health was fine and her level was definitely a few dozen above his own.
"Good, now can you apply any support skills?" Pavell asked.
Galahad was already to struggle maintain a connection, so when he pushed as much mana as he could onto a defense boost, his tether snapped. The snap was audible enough to startle some of the nearby patients and leave the scent of ozone in the air.
That's when revelation exploded into his mind, Galahad was not heartbroken about his friends. because they were still ALIVE.
He began gripping Nurse Pavell's wrist very tightly. She assumed Galahad had begun to breakdown because his body was too weak to send her his skill boosts. She was trying to comfort Galahad with words about recovery and eventually moving pass the pain, too bad he was only focusing on what he started to remember about the night in the cavern.
He knew he recalled something now and the drugs were almost done fading. There was one thing that he knew felt strange about the last part of the night. It was his mana tethers.
His mana tethers kept operating after the dark crystals and being blown up, they still connected to the others. His friends, he didn't lose the connection. It broke only after he was teleported to the platform in the spire. That only meant one thing for the rest of his team.
Galahad's friends were still alive and trapped in the dungeon.
Before he could say anything to Pavell, he passed out from exhaustion. He drain his body all the mana it could spare from healing itself. Pavell quietly strapped Galahad's hand back into the cuff and went down to the main lobby with an updated status of Priority Patient #2.
When Galahad kept falling in and out of sleep, he would keep dreaming about being back the cavern and the black mana orb sitting on the pedestal. In his dreams, only he and the orb were in the giant, empty cavern. Yet the vast space was filled with hundreds of voices whispering all around him and each time he'd reach out for the orb, he would suddenly wake up with no chance of ever grasping it again.
"This is almost as bad as the stupid tree dream. At least I was able to touch the mana flow in that dream."
Sometimes when he woke up, he'd cast mana tether to make sure Venora was still alive next to him. Sadly he had no strength to provide and support power for healing, but it gave him something to occupy time as the day passed.
At one point on the fifth day of being bedridden, Galahad woke up and the only source light was from the moonlight shining in through the window. He raised his head and saw his torso and arms were still strapped into the bed.
'I get the whole repeated testing and overnight stay, but I would have thought that the healers could have finished the job by now.' Galahad sighed and dropped his head back into his pillow.
His aching arm and neck was causing a lot of pain that really shortened his temper. So much of his emotional anger was constantly bubbling up to the surface, some of which he didn't even know he had. He noticed that he'd feel so easily agitated about things he never felt bothered before and he started to question what was going on in his own mind.
'Did that stupid fucking orb do this to me? Or maybe I'm starting to feel lost about all this?' Galahad shook his head at himself. 'Don't start acting like that now. I need to get better and find them, the sooner the better.'
At this point Galahad didn't want to sleep or stay awake, it was like choosing between nightmares or boredom. Turns out he didn't need to choose this time as a third opportunity just presented itself.
"Hello?" called out a quiet, female voice.
Galahad turned his head and saw Venora's eyes were opening and staring up in space. She had finally awoken, but no one was in the room at this time of night.
"Hey Ven." Galahad said at a normal volume.
"Oh sorry…" She was startled someone was actually in the room with her, "Galahad? Is that you?"
She had never heard him sound so mentally tired before, she almost didn't recognize his voice if not for he was very few to call her 'Ven.'
"Yeah it's me… how are you feeling right now?"
"hmphff, Everything hurts... Where are we? Is this the medical center?"
"Yeah don't get up yet. Now before we play the game of 'endless question toss,' what exactly do you remember?" Galahad wanted to see if her experience could give him some insight about the events in the dungeon, and he also didn't want to tell her certain things she might not have witnessed. It was in his best interest to not be the bearer of bad news, then trigger something terrible for her to remember.
She silently pondered for a moment before listing off what she could recall.
"I remember… the guild competition… w-we kill three fire salamanders… then all the monsters ran off and everything went quiet. Something jumped out of the shadows, covered in some black smoke. Casmus attacked it- it exploded! Galahad it nearly killed Casmus, what happened to the team?!" She began to hyperventilate loudly.
Galahad hoped she didn't witness the carnage. Unfortunately her rising stress proved that was not the case. He could practically hear her world collapse all around her as she recalled the smoke monster.
"Hold on, hold on. It's okay, I need you to relax. Slow your breathing and I'll tell you what happened, okay?"
Once Venora's breathing sounded a little bit more steady, Galahad was about to explain that she can't overburden her damaged body, but she asked a very sudden question.
"Did anyone else survive?" She seemed to remember the onslaught of her teammates.
Galahad shut his eyes as he focused on carefully wording what he planned to say. "... I'm sorry. You were the only one left by the time we arrived."
"..." She didn't say anything, but Galahad assumed she was trying to hold back the tears. He knew exactly how she felt, but he was holding onto something he couldn't tell her just yet.
Then he heard her rustle around her bedsheets, her bare feet made a soft slap on the tile floor.
"Wait, don't get out of bed. You just woke up. Venora!" Galahad knew her body is barely functioning, he didn't want to end up making her condition even more critical.
She gasped when saw the damage across Galahad's body. The two moons casted various shadows along his completely burned arm, chest, and neck. With the straps holding him in place, he looked like a partially shredded corpse shackled to the bed.
"I didn't get to the part where I explained what happened after we found you. As you can tell, we ran into that same monster as you." Galahad turned his head away so she didn't see the tears gathering that would reveal how he felt at that moment.
"Oh gods, Galahad… wh-what happened to you?" She wanted to reach out to touch him to see if this was just a dream, but she stopped herself.
Galahad cleared his throat and looked her in the eyes with a bit of fear and few other emotions, "I will explain what I know, but you need to sit down before you damage yourself any further."
And so, Galahad told Venora of the night he had in the dungeon.
"We noticed a bunch of Serpopards running to or from some section of the dungeon. Shortly after, we realized something was causing them to run. Nothing was around, an eventually we found you… and the others, you were the last one even remotely alive. Our competition adviser took you back to the surface for help, and that's when we heard screaming."
Galahad talked with Venora for a good hour of every detail he could remember until he said he blacked out. He didn't want to lie to her, but he had to be sure about everything himself before telling her about his team being alive. He left out the black orb specifically denotating and the giant mass of people trapped in the crystals beneath the ground. He didn't want to burden her with his discovery.
Galahad was concerned about what to tell her when she asked questions, but it turns out he didn't need to worry. He fell back asleep mid sentence without even realizing it. This time, he fell asleep and didn't dream at all.
Galahad spent three more days in the hospital, they finally unstrapped him from the bed and let him do small stretches and stand from the cot. Each time he moved his arm, beads of puss and blood would leak from various burns along his body. The nurse told him that his wounds were inflicted by some form of magic, an extremely odd one she put it.
"It had a very high concentration of power, but it only tore apart the skin and muscles before stopping there, we assume some sort of trap or magical combustion. You can count yourself lucky, a few months of fruta oil and no stressful exertions should leave you with only scar tissue."
Galahad was not sure which part of that statement said even remotely lucky. 'I'm physically fucked beyond recognition, my level has severely dropped, my friends are trapped in a literal cage of hell, and my face looks like boiled worms. Where does she find luck in my life.'
*****
Outside the medical center, a carriage ran through the streets. The middle aged driver had the horses moving at a cautious speed because the ice began to form on the stone roads during this time of year. He heard a knocking from inside the cabin, indicating he arrived at the destination. The man pulled over and the door swung open.
Galahad was about to have his first visitors in the medical center.