Something needed to be done and it needed to be done quick.
I gripped the earth, cursing my own helplessness. What was the point in a power that could not protect me but would instead bring us all closer to our deaths? The moment I thought about it, I realised that fate was cruel and thought of no one. It had no consideration, and paid no mind to people's circumstances. With all the strength I could muster I tried to expel all of the mana back out of me but it was easier said than done. Theoretically it should have been an easy feat but I'm a monster who had only learned how to take from others without giving back. That selfishness was coming back to bite me in the ass.
Every muscle in my body was tensing as I tried to force it into reality. I imagined the threads untangling from within me and being pulled out of my body to return to their rightful owners. I imagined all of the colour draining from within me so that my life could return to the monotonous one I had so hated up until this point. I imagined my comrades being brought back to their energetic selves, so full of might. But no matter how many images crossed my mind, I could not will any of it into existence. That was the harsh reality. You could think yourself into a state of anguish and torment but you could not think yourself into a better situation.
The rest of the team were still on their knees, attacked by the pain of having their mana being ripped from their bodies. They tried to overcome the agony that came with it, though it did not help any of us. At the very least they could 'die like men' not that such praise and ideation did any good for a corpse when they would all be buried with good and bad people alike. The earth had no preference for who it consumed, it would take all of us, and when we were down there it hardly mattered. The dirt would not differentiate between a brave soldier and an immoral murderer, not when some people struggled to differentiate the two.
Though I was incapable of returning back to the past and leaving my team's strength intact, the attempt to send back their mana had at the very least stopped me from taking any more. As long as I continued using everything within me, I could prevent us from being in a worse state. Though that meant very little with the strangers looming over us and getting closer with each passing second. While hardly any time had passed, it felt like hours had gone by. My sense of time was all over the place and the only reason I had any grasp on the present was because every movement seemed to slow down in my eyes. Everyone around me was moving so painstakingly slowly that I wanted to grab them by their shoulders and yell at them. Gradually my helplessness was taking the form of anger yet again.
Despite that I had no way to vent my anger, not when I was consuming all of my energy trying to survive. I was in too much physical pain to even get up, let alone do anything other than stare at the ground while I gripped at it, hoping it wouldn't swallow me whole. The longer I stayed in that position the weaker my arms became. They were slowly bending onwards and bringing my entire body closer to the ground and that terrified me. As much as I clung to it for support and out of desperation, I was gripped by the fear that it would open up my grave from right below me and I would fall into a deep slumber. It is hard to believe that something like that wouldn't happen. No matter how outlandish it seemed, everything in my life had been so nonsensical that the it would hardly be surprising. Anything was possible, especially if it was cruel, and that was a fact I was tortured with time and time again.
UGH
I turned my head to confirm the source of the sound. The team members were slowly beginning to gain their strength even if it was not much. At the very least, they had enough energy to raise their heads slightly and make sounds. The silence is what frightened me. As long as they were silent, they may as well have been dead. I had no way of knowing with how preoccupied I was with myself. My selfishness knew no bounds. So, for me, they had died and come back to life. As far as I was aware, this was a miracle and the small light in the otherwise dark world that I needed to hope for something. What it was I didn't know but it was enough.
I tightened my muscles until I felt that they would either tear out of my body or somehow deflate, though they did neither. With newfound will I continued on focusing on expelling any and all energy from my body. It no longer mattered whether it belonged to them or was my own. I just needed anything that would help me and right now it was them. I had no chance of surviving by myself so at the very least they all needed to be physically capable of protecting me. Though whether or not they would do that is something I am uncertain about.
The harder I held myself the more my vision began to fade away from me. The colourful threads that were consuming all of me had just become small flashes of light shooting from one area to another. The world was caving in on me, there is no better way to describe how I was feeling. I clung to my consciousness, afraid of what would happen if I had lost even that. As I fought to keep myself awake I could head my team members beginning to move. It must have been a mixture of relief and exhaustion but the moment I heard their bodies beginning to shuffle about among the leaves, I fainted.