Several large holes had torn Nate's chest open to the point that you could see the ground beneath him through the wounds. The paleness of his skin and blue tint to his lips, along with his closed eyes and stillness, were those of a corpse.

  "Why isn't he getting better?" Luke asked, taking a place next to Milla, who kept casting healing spells on him.

  She shook her head, expression twisted with exhaustion. "Look at his health bar. It's fluttering like the wings of a little bird."

  That was an apt description. It wavered back and forth around fifteen percent of his full health, sometimes dropping as far down as five percent before rising back up, but never above twenty. Milla's healing just wasn't enough to restore Nate's health.

  "Everyone, gather in close right now!" Luke shouted, and they did as he ordered without question.

  At this point, The Healer's Moment was off cooldown, and he cast it straight away. Delving into Nate's mana channels to get a closer look at what was wrong, as if the huge holes in him weren't a good enough clue, Luke also latched on to Penny and Nymh, who stood closest. He'd need a lot of mana batteries to bring Nate back.

  Despite the seriousness of the situation, or perhaps because of it, Luke gawped at the information laid out before him. Nate's wounds were deep, wide, and numerous, all of them critical. Each of them by itself would have been enough to kill a normal person within seconds. Nate was an Integrated, a tank. That had allowed him to survive this far when most would be far into the afterlife. How was Luke even supposed to go about this? Was there anything he could do?

  Enough of that! The feeling of overwhelm would get him nowhere. Focus, he needed to focus!

  Not wanting to waste The Healer's Moment, Luke got to work. They'd received little training in emergency room medicine, but his class had been shown recorded videos of real incidents in the ICU during an overview class. That, along with all his newfound experience, would see him through this. First, the immediate life-threatening wounds.

  The airways were fine. Check. Next, the neck and spine. Neck, fine. Spinal cord? Not so much. The dragon must've bitten into Nate to create wounds like these, had torn a large hole in Nate's lower back, at L3 or L5. Weaver's Renewal took care of that, regrowing the obliterated tissue.

  "He's not breathing," Hannah whispered.

  Luke blinked, not even having realized The Healer's Moment had ended. He sent in two additional threads of mana, one to Nate's lungs and one to his heart. A faint heartbeat greeted him, but the lungs weren't moving.

  "Rescue breath," he croaked as he began massaging the heart to keep it from stopping. "You need to give him air."

  Nate was losing a lot of blood through the many wounds, and an increased heart rate would speed that up, but the alternative was death, which wasn't preferable. With the spine back together, the heart pumping, and the lungs getting air, Luke turned his attention to the wounds. A lot of flesh was gone. Same with muscle tissue and even parts of organs. If only there wasn't a cooldown on Weaver's Renewal.

  "Losing him," Milla breathed.

  Weaver's Mercy kept Nate going a little longer while Luke pushed healing mana into the holes. He forced them closed, and while that allowed some of the missing bits and pieces to re-grow, it was far from perfect growth.

  Penny gasped, and Luke let her go, moving the thread to one of the casters from Milla's party instead. She was only at about forty percent of max mana, but that was more than Curtis's maximum. Healing and closing up the wounds with Needle of Life didn't take much time, and Luke glanced at Nate's health bar to see that it was now ticking up at a slow but steady pace.

  Far from pleased with the results of the brute-force healing of Nate's wounds, Luke decided to let them be for the time being since they were no longer lethal. That left the brain. Just as Luke feared, there was a distinct lack of activity in there, and the intricate web of mana channels had faded. Some were just gone.

  "More mana," Luke gasped, changing out Nymh for Hannah, who didn't have much mana to spare. He swapped her out, too, looking for Liza.

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  Right, Liza wasn't there.

  He found the Longstrider instead. He would have to do. Draining as much mana from the human batteries as he dared, Luke set to repairing the mana channels in Nate's brain, much like he'd done with Alan's empty space after the tumor removal. The channels shone like streaks of light left by falling meteors across the night sky, but for every channel he repaired, two dimmed and then fell dark and inert.

  The heart wasn't beating on its own anymore. Luke kept up with the massaging. With teeth clenched so hard his jaw was starting to hurt, he redoubled his efforts. Four threads of mana in the brain, one around Nate's lungs and one tending to his heart, with two latched onto his friends to drain them. It was too much. His head spun as he regrew mana channel after mana channel, refusing to give up.

  At some point, both Weaver's Renewal and The Healer's Moment came off cooldown, and he used them, but they made no difference.

  "Luke," Hannah said. "You're taking too much. You're hurting me."

  Letting Hannah and the Longstrider go, he took from Mateo and sent a thread to Curtis.

  "No," Curtis said, and Luke found his thread rebuffed. It had pushed inside Curtis's mana channels, but was then repelled with force.

  "Mana," Luke whispered.

  "It's over," Curtis said.

  Blinking stupid moisture from his eyes, Luke ignored Curtis and drank a mana potion.

  Milla put a hand on his shoulder. "Little brother."

  "He needs air," Luke breathed, as he forced two mana channels into being in Nate's brain. By then, it was almost full dark in there.

  Nate had been there with Luke in the Tutorial Dungeon. He’d been one of the few good people in a seething mass of assholes and arrogance. Also, he'd saved Luke more times than Luke had been able to return the favor, and with that head injury healed, this was supposed to be the start of the rest of his life. Not the end of it.

  The end of it.

  End.

  Luke's shoulders heaved as Mateo pulled him away from Nate with a gentle but firm grip.

  "It will be well, my friend," Mateo whispered, holding Luke in an embrace as the others crowded in. "You fought admirably and with honor."

  Milla reached in and pressed herself close. "We did our best, little brother."

  They stood like that in silence for a moment longer until new sounds reached Luke's ears. Groans. He blinked and wiped at his eyes again, drew in a deep breath, and expelled it through his nose. "There are more people to heal," he said, disentangling himself from the group.

  He walked away from Nate as his friend dissolved into motes of light. As he left, he felt the others' gazes burning on his back, but did his best to ignore them. He was fine. He would be fine. This was not the first person he hadn't managed to heal.

  Other people milled about the large area the dragon had covered, helping the injured to the best of their abilities. Luke joined them, restoring broken pieces of their bodies, stitching wounds closed, and repairing other injuries, both physical and metaphysical.

  A numbness spread. Embracing it, Luke waded through injured after injured, providing care and stealing mana from those who'd made it through the horrific battle with nothing more than minor scrapes. Some attempted to speak with him, but Luke just shook his head, ignoring them. For now, they were mana batteries to be used in his healing. Nothing more, nothing less.

  Congratulations! You have reached level 15!

  He blinked at the message and shook his head. Must've been close to leveling up after the dragon. Three levels in one fight. That was massive, but he didn't care. In that moment, he didn't care.

  As he worked, whispers of the fight drifted over to him. Words of Curtis leaping up and all but decapitating the dragon while Hannah held it down. Then, at the end, how, in its death throes, it had reached down to get one last attack in, reaching for Hannah. And then how Nate, their friend, the ever-present tank, had stepped in without hesitation.

  That had been the end of it. Words like 'awesome' and 'epic' mixed with horror from others and vows never to enter another portal again in their lives. How many had died down there? So many lives lost. A catastrophe in the making.

  The number of injured seemed almost endless, and soon people's mana regeneration couldn't keep up, which made Luke use the few mana potions he still held, then he drew on the patients themselves.

  When all else failed, he patched them up as best he could, minimizing his mana use. He moved as if in a daze, feeling more sluggish by the moment as his mana dwindled and his sense of focus frayed. Soon his eyelids felt heavy and his throat dried up, like he hadn't slept in days.

  Numbness spread from the tips of his fingers to his hands, rising upward as he fumbled with Threads of Mana and the Needle of Life, fixing a gash running from a woman's armpit to her knee. Luke was too far gone to work nerve bundles to an acceptable degree, so before starting, he gave everyone the option.

  "Stay injured or feel the pain."

  Everyone chose pain.

  Again and again, he saw the glow of Milla's healing spreading through the crowd like an angelic, soothing balm, while he stumbled from injured to injured, taking care of those not reached by his sister's light. Her mana regenerated at a quick pace, but the spells came with a heavy cost, meaning she wasn't effective in a long, drawn-out session like this.

  The corners of his vision darkened as he worked, and the always-present but often obscured threads of the world crept in as exhaustion mounted. His connection to whatever was out there grew, or perhaps it was just the veil parting for him. What he found so beautiful last time, he now ignored. This was not the time to ponder the mysteries of the universe or The Greater System.

  Then, as he'd known it would, that being out there between and beyond the threads peered out at him through the void. The attention bore into him.

  Luke stopped and narrowed his eyes, staring back. "What do you want?"