Book 5: Chapter 51
Kay stared down at the Royal Avalon as it was being loaded to set sail. He was on top of the stairs leading down to the docks, waiting on Eleniah to finish saying goodbye to everyone she needed to.
“Sure you can’t stay longer?” Alahna asked.
“I wish we could, just to let Eleniah spend more time with you and the rest of her family, but the messages from home are worrying me and these were written months ago.” He held up the letters that had arrived a couple of days ago. “Who knows what’s going on now? I need to get home and help.”
“I get it. I would never want to be away while something happens to my people.” She turned and looked behind them at the city that was being rebuilt.
They’d had a little over a week of relative peace after the last battle against the nanomachine menace, and rebuilding had begun quickly, aided by mages and manipulators that could almost grow buildings from the ground. Kay deeply understood why Earth Manipulators and Earth Mages were generally seen as some of the wealthiest magical Classes, but scenes like this really drove the point home.
Kay turned as well and watched workers haul supplies and building blocks while mages and manipulators floated them around, assembling them into recreations of the buildings that had been lost. When the nanomachines had been energized by that blue glow they had leveled everything as they consumed more and more to fuel their propagation, leaving bare dirt behind. He explosion Eleniah had made with her two Class Skills hadn’t helped either, and almost half a square mile of buildings and possessions had been lost. The empty space made it easy to rebuild since there was no rubble to clean for most of the city, but it also meant there was nothing to bury when it came to the people that had been lost.
The causalities had been low according to everyone Kay had spoken too, only a few hundred in total and less than a dozen of those being civilians. Someone in the know had spotted the black shapes breaching the surface of the ocean as they approached Sel and had immediately started an evacuation. Only a few civilians hadn’t left, the stubborn kind that would have refused to leave in the face of any disaster. Everyone was telling Kay that they were so lucky to lose so few people, but all he could feel was shame for letting any die at all.
Two of the deaths were his own people, members of the Blood Guard. He’d been separated from them during the battle, as much from his own reckless charge into the fray as anything else, and they’d been unable to fight there way to him. They’d ended up retreating from the growing mass with everyone else that couldn’t burn away huge swathes of nanomachines, and two of his had fallen protecting other while they’d made their escape. Lauren had lost her entire lower half trying to keep them both alive and had only survive thanks to the surviving Blood Guard and some other’s donating blood to her so she could heal.
Kay took a deep breath. “I’m sorry. I could-“