The blast of the explosion hit Karragin about two minutes later and Ikaris felt his feet lift off the ground as the shockwave slammed into him. His entire skeleton cracked and several internal organs shifted.
With the village already in ruins, he whirled for several dozen meters before crashing heavily at the edge of the jungle. Temporarily unable to move or see, he waited for the pain to subside and when he felt fit to do so, he opened his eyes again.
A sharp pain in his liver suddenly radiated throughout his body as he tried to sit up, and he lay paralyzed in the same posture for more than a minute, dripping with sweat, before the pain passed enough for him to move again.
He had several broken ribs.
When the pain subsided, he slowly got to his feet, and then finally contemplated the scope of the disaster. But before looking at his immediate surroundings, his gaze was first drawn with trepidation to what remained of the Great Wall.
A gap of several kilometers replaced the original high wall and the titanic creature was nowhere in sight. Squinting his eyes he thought he saw a matching shape moving on the horizon and realized with relief that the monster had retreated.
"Phew... It's finally over." Ikaris exhaled with wobbly legs. He had been thinking that this hell would never end.
The dozens of figures and the huge dragon that had stood against the abomination were nowhere in sight, and he wondered how many had perished in the confrontation. He almost forgot his plans for revenge against the two morons who had clashed over their village instead of doing their job.
With the danger over, he shifted his focus to the village and its few survivors.
"Moooo!"
The Alpha Bison was the only one among the dead and the living who hadn't budged an inch. The mammal was almost as heavy as a rhinoceros and a squall, no matter how powerful, could not shake it so easily. Seeing that Ikaris was fine, he mooed softly.
" Yeah yeah well done... I got it, you saved her." The boy let out an exasperated smile as he listened to the Demonic Beast bragging.
"Mooooo!" (As long as you know.)
The good news was that the buffalo had indeed shielded Ellie with his body. The bad news was that Toby and Malia had been left to fend for themselves.
Malia, who was even lighter than him, had flown into the jungle, her flight stopped only by one of the few hundred-year-old tree trunks that had survived the clash of the two individuals headed out to fight the Crawling daddy...
Toby, who was much heavier, hadn't flown as far, but being unconscious and not having been stopped by anything, he had landed in a terrible way... The back of his head had slapped the ground first, stopped in its tracks while the rest of his body continued its course.
His cervical vertebrae were utterly broken. If he wasn't dead, he was basically quadriplegic.
Ikaris checked on Malia, then Ellie before finishing with the veteran soldier. Amazingly, he was still alive... The boy didn't know if this was something to rejoice about or a fate worse than death.
On Earth, such a life was not easy to endure despite modern technology and medical breakthroughs. In the Forsaken Lands, he was tremendously pessimistic about his prognosis.
Yet this was a world of magic where anything was possible. Perhaps there were some Healing Sorcerers out there capable of healing this kind of crippling injury.
Not knowing what else to do, and having lost his bag, Ikaris decided to explore the hatch behind Malia and Grallu's cottage, hoping to find something to bandage their wounds and perhaps something to make a stretcher for Toby. He hadn't forgotten that the Great Wall had just blown up and there was no stopping the Crawlers from flooding the continent.
His tension had almost left his body, but he was transfixed once more when instead of the hatch he expected to see, he found a man half buried inside the wood.
The man was awfully old. Even more wrinkled than Grallu. But unlike her, he looked younger than his age...
His long crimson hair draped over his shoulders glistened like a thousand rubies and he wore a matching red tailcoat embroidered with gold and silver. All his clothes, jewelry and accessories reeked of luxury and opulence. A gold watch encrusted with rubies encircled his right wrist, thick rings set with rubies, emeralds and diamonds occupied each of his fingers and he even wore a monocle with a platinum frame.
It was as if his hair and flashy clothes were trying to hide his extreme old age and pallor.
In contrast, the pendant hanging around his neck was the most mundane. A leather string at the end of which was a fang of an unknown species, possibly a lion, or a bear, but he was not an expert.
However, this man was dying.
Instead of his heart and lungs, a half-meter wide tusk was embedded in his chest, its tip sinking into Malia's basement. A black substance leaked from the broken tooth and was corroding the injured man's flesh.
But the most shocking part was that the man was still conscious. As Ikaris approached, his crimson eyes flashed at the boy and he instantly spaced out.
"Come."
As if hypnotized, the teenager walked without resistance towards the old man and when he stopped in front of him, the latter ordered again,
"Come closer."
Still in a daze, Ikaris moved closer to the dying man until he was only a few centimeters from his face.
"Closer."
The boy moved closer again and suddenly he felt a sharp pain in his throat that immediately turned to pleasure. The sensation lasted only a second, because right after his body was violently thrown in the air.
The hypnosis broken, he crashed to the ground gracelessly, but with his reflexes he managed to get away without further fractures. Instead, he coughed up a mouthful of blood, his hand squeezing his neck in confusion as he tried to stop the blood loss.
"A Crawling-Thrall... I'm really jinxed." The old man said as he spat out black blood. Inwardly, he cursed the wolf bastard who had treacherously ambushed him during the chaos, allowing the abomination to mortally wound him.
Looking up at the dying man again, Ikaris was careful not to stare into his eyes this time.
"Not only are you destroying my village, but you also immediately try to kill me." The boy growled coldly. "Give me one good reason why I shouldn't let you die impaled on this huge tooth. Magnus."
How could he not have recognized the old man? From the moment he opened his mouth Ikaris recognized his voice.
It was obviously one of the two specks of light that had collided over the village a few moments earlier and caused its total annihilation as well as Bree's avoidable death.
As the boy spoke, the old man's eyes widened in wonder. Ikaris thought for a second that it was surprise at being recognized, but his next sentence disproved that assumption.
"Are you conscious?!" Magnus stammered stupidly, eyeing him as if he were an alien.
"Do I look like I'm sleeping?" Ikaris sneered with a twitching face.
Because of his injuries and his high Vitality working to repair everything, his hunger had begun to tug at him again more acutely than ever. He had to hold back with all his willpower so as not to retaliate against the old man's bite by chomping down on his arm.
Faced with the teenager's sarcasm, Magnus was able to confirm that he was indeed himself and his attitude reversed completely, a crazed excitement lighting up his livid face.
"Boy, can you lend me your hand? I swear I won't attack you again. Though, I do need human blood urgently cough, cough..."
Ikaris was pretty sure the old man was sincere, but he refused to come any closer. Born liars were rare, but he knew quite a few in his former life. An old fox like this one certainly had more than one trick up his sleeve.
Seeing that the teenager refused to approach, the Vampire sighed but did not give up. With great difficulty, he raised his bony hand, activated one of his rings and a strange silver device resembling the planet Saturn appeared in his palm. He was so weak that he dropped it immediately and it rolled on the ground towards Ikaris.
"I just want you to put your hands on it." Magnus wheezed, his eyelids growing heavier and heavier.
Sensing that the old man was no longer a danger, Ikaris walked over to the device and placed his hands on it as instructed. It was a metallic sphere surrounded by thousands of extremely thin concentric rings. The most jarring thing was that these rings were not attached to anything, hovering above the ground without any support. With his rational mind, he put this oddity down to a powerful magnet system.
As soon as he put his hands on the sphere, it began to glow, as did exactly 101 rings, and the old man's half-closed eyes lit up with emotion.