Chapter 191: The Weight of Steel and Flesh
The crash of metal against carapace echoed across the perimeter. The tribe’s vanguard pressed forward through impact force, snapping chitinous limbs and crushing armored skulls with mining picks, battle axes, and Kellar’s heavy war club.
Vael spun through the fray, driving his two steel picks directly into the joints of a giant centipede. The impact cracked with a thud, carving deep fissures into the beast’s metallic armor.
Beside him, Lupar and Marty—two of the original twelve hunters—fought shoulder to shoulder as in the old days. Lupar brought his stone mallet down onto a red beetle’s back, shattering its shell in a single blow.
"Take that, you damned vermin!" shouted Lupar, spitting dirt and gritting his teeth.
Marty, right behind him, thrust an iron spear straight into the fissure Lupar had opened, finishing the beast instantly. Both were breathing heavily, their arms bulging from effort, but their faces bore a ferocity.
"Damn it! I didn’t know we’d gotten this strong!" shouted one of the novice soldiers, staring at his arms in shock after splitting a steel insect in half with a shovel blow.
"It’s from the beast meat!" Grok shouted back, roaring as he checked the charge of another monster with his shield. "The Shaman has been feeding us exceptionally well! Our bodies have evolved, but we were too blind to see it!"
Brak joined the slaughter, decapitating a centipede with a clean sweep of his battle axe.
"We relied way too much on those firearms!" shouted Brak. "We got complacent! We thought pulling a trigger would win us every war! If we can’t fight hand-to-hand when bullets fail, we’re easy prey! We can’t keep going on like this!"
The commanders’ words struck deep into the men’s hearts. The original twelve led the slaughter; their strength, forged through months of eating mana-rich meat, far exceeded normal limits. Marty dodged a centipede’s pincers and delivered a brutal elbow strike that shattered its lower jaw, while Lupar smashed its legs to pieces with his mallet.
Kellar carved a path through the left flank with the Overlord Club, unleashing a spray of sparks with every strike. Beside him, Ignis crushed three lava beetles beneath his runic paws and Freyja severed the heads of insects trying to flank the line.
Amid the chaos and war cries, a sharp voice echoed from the area of the collapsed gorge.
"Shaman! It’s urgent, come quick! I need your help!" bellowed Thorin, waving his arms from atop a pile of rubble. "I found something!"
Kellar crushed the head of the last centipede within reach and snapped his head toward Thorin, sensing that whatever the dwarf had uncovered among the explosion’s debris was no ordinary stone.
Kellar rushed toward the gorge, carving his way through the thick smoke and the stench of charred flesh. Reaching the rubble pile, he found Thorin pointing down toward a fissure wedged between two massive stone blocks.
Lying there was an almost entirely carbonized body, breathing with difficulty through shallow gasps.
"What happened?" asked Kellar, closing the distance.
"It’s Krag, Shaman," Thorin answered, his voice cracking. "What do we do?"
Krag’s body was completely shattered by the blast. His limbs suffered severe full-depth burns and bone was visible through torn skin. Yet miraculously, a thread of life lingered. Despite the punishment and penal labor in the mines, Helga, his ex-wife, couldn’t bear to watch him suffer so severely and had been secretly sending him top-quality beast meat. That steady stream of mana-rich nourishment had strengthened his physical constitution to superhuman levels, allowing his body to barely survive the direct impact of the explosion.
Boran arrived at a sprint, his face drenched in sweat and tears. With a broken voice, he recounted to Kellar how Krag had refused to fall back, how he had grabbed the torch to light the fuses directly in front of the horde’s jaws, and how his final words before the blast had been an apology to the Shaman for his betrayal, hoping his death would wash away his sins.
Upon hearing the story, Kellar’s legs gave out. He fell to his knees on the hot gravel, breaking into silent tears.
Krag had been his right hand, his brother-in-arms during the tribe’s darkest hours. After the betrayal and the punishment, Kellar had taken Helga as his woman, and in that moment, staring at the former chief hunter reduced to a burnt shell seeking only redemption, Kellar felt like the worst of men. A crushing guilt weighed on his chest.
Looking down at his former friend’s agonizing form, an agonizing question consumed his mind: use everything to save him, or end his suffering and kill him to prevent further complications for the tribe.
Kellar clenched his fists and wiped the tears from his face. He stared down at Krag’s body and made his decision. He was not going to let him die.
He pulled up the mental interface panel without wasting a second. Thanks to his previous spell creations, he possessed plenty of experience structuring techniques: he knew full well that a skill’s effect and its cost had to be equivalent. Accessing the Shamanic Totem’s network directly, Kellar began formulating the new ability inside his mind, channeling the system directives:
[Skill Design]
[Name: [Heal]]
[Effect: Restore destroyed biological tissue, close fatal wounds, and purify damaged vitality.]
However, upon seeing the estimated mana cost to regenerate Krag’s charred flesh and exposed bone, Kellar knew immediately that his own personal mana pool wouldn’t be enough to save him.
"Totem!" invoked Kellar mentally, linking directly with the main village’s core.
Miles away, the ancestral structure of the Shamanic Totem began glowing with an intense golden and green light. Answering its lord’s desperate plea, the reservoir of power accumulated by the tribe over weeks began flowing through the spiritual link, surging across the mountains in an stream to manifest in Kellar’s hands.
A sphere of warm, brilliant light enveloped the Shaman’s hands. Kellar placed them directly onto Krag’s shattered chest.
[Skill Created: [Heal] (Shamanic Rank)]
[Cost: Shaman’s Mana Pool + Tribal Totem Energy Reserve.]
The green light descended upon the carbonized body. At visible speed, the burnt skin began flaking away like dry ash, while layers of fresh flesh, veins, and muscle tissue sprouted and knit together over exposed bone. Krag’s shallow gasps grew progressively deeper and steadier as vitality poured back into his system.
Boran and Thorin watched the scene with wide eyes, holding their breath as the miracle of shamanic magic reconstructed the fallen hunter from the brink of death.