The Insider System

Chapter 352: Night Life Pt.4

Once he saw the small amount of healing that would happen with each compression it made him realize they weren\'t too late to save this guy\'s life and the only thing that was still in question was whether the healer had enough strength to keep the compressions going for long enough.

Knowing this he was unable to take his eyes off of the man on the ground so he could watch the scrape slowly disappear. He didn\'t know why he thought the guy would get up off the ground once the wound finished healing but almost right after it disappeared his suspicion was proven correct as the healer stopped pumping the man\'s heart and backed off.

"That was close." Before the healer got anything else out he was interrupted by the girl they had saved earlier. "Is he really alive?" The man on the ground who Donny thought was probably related to her in some way still hadn\'t moved so it made sense that she might not be able to tell. "He is, him waking up is another matter altogether though."

They could both tell she was confused by this thinking the man would be fine now that he was breathing again. Donny knew not everyone was aware of brain damage not always being healed correctly by potions sometimes if the potion wasn\'t high enough level but he didn\'t want to say this so he left it to the doctor to explain.

"During the first few minutes of death you can be revived with the method we just used but I only had a basic healing potion not anything expensive. While he was dead there\'s a good chance his brain was damaged from the lack of breath which wouldn\'t have healed correctly leaving almost scars in his head. This is just a possibility though so don\'t worry about it too much."

Right after the healer stopped talking the man started to move with timing that made them both wish they had just kept the thing about his brain to themselves. "This is good. It probably means he has a high enough Endurance to avoid the side effects I just mentioned." This was good news for the girl but Donny felt like there was still something he needed to ask before he needed to get back to work hunting down the phantoms.

"How did you end up inside the phantom?" He was pretty sure he already knew the answer but he wanted to know for sure for later when the mayor would ask them what happened. "It grabbed me while me and my brother were exiting our home. My brother tried to get it off me but his magic isn\'t very strong and eventually it got a hold of him as well so I tried to blast my brother away from us to safety using an Earth spell. I thought it would be ok if I used my own mana to cast the spell and didn\'t use it on the phantom directly but I was wrong. As soon as I used my mana It started to drain me and grow in size."

Hearing the girls story he guessed reality was a bit different to what they had expected. Originally they had assumed she had been startled into using her magic but reality was she had kept calm until her brother failed to free her from the phantom and had gotten caught as well.

Done hearing all he needed from the girl he stopped her talking by raising his hand and saying. "I must leave now." After he said this he turned towards the man who had helped him heal the four victims and said. "Thank you for your help."

He didn\'t go into detail on how much the older man had helped him and the people back at the fort waiting for the food to return because it was private information but the man didn\'t really seem to care about the thanks going right back to working on the two guards to see if they were ok so Donny didn\'t think it mattered to the man.

He knew some people really didn\'t care about receiving thanks for the things they did or it made them feel awkward so saying it again or adding more detail wouldn\'t really do anything for the man. It didn\'t take long for him to get back to where Fendis and him were assigned to defend and it was pretty obvious he had been away for too long. "Where have you been?"

Guessing Fendis hadn\'t heard the screams or had just assumed it had been nothing Donny said. "There was a phantom that got out of control. I helped take it down." He didn\'t say anything about the three people who died or the girl that had caused all of it because that could be saved for after he and Fendis dealt with the phantom swarm that was slowly drifting towards them from all sides.

As he was killing them all off he looked towards Fendis who had gone back to tinkering with his formation and smiled. He had been a bit worried it was still too early for Fendis to be messing around with custom spells let alone formations so it was good that he had been wrong.

Donny had been someone who always struggled with moving too fast in his training and while he had pulled off his reckless methods of making quick progress he had a lot of help from both his father and the Metal shield he had in the past. Now he was without both so even his progress had slowed down to normal.

It was a bit disheartening to realize he was more normal than he had thought for all these years but it didn\'t take away the fact he was ahead of his peers because of his past advantages. He was also still planning on reclaiming the shield so hopefully he could quickly forget about the slump he was currently in.

"Alright, I\'m going to go look at the other areas to make sure everything is under control. I wasn\'t the only one who left to go help with the giant phantom and I\'m a bit worried about the others." After he said this he ran around the rest of the area their group was in charge of and saw everything was fine.

This didn\'t surprise him since the only reason their area had been overrun was Fendis took around forty seconds to deal with each phantom and they were coming faster than that now. Returning to Fendis he saw the man once again surrounded by phantoms and started to chuckle because he wasn\'t even trying to do anything about them.

It seemed whatever problem he was trying to deal with in his formation had his full attention and he wasn\'t going to stop working on it to fight until he absolutely had to. That or Fendis had been hoping he would return in time to do it for him which was what happened. After he took out the phantoms that had gathered he decided to stay here next to Fendis until he was done working on the formation and was able to fight for himself.

After about ten minutes Fendis lifted the formation into the air again. Even though he wanted to stay and see if the changes had resulted in any big improvements he quickly left to patrol the other parts of their area. The phantoms were now coming every ten seconds or so which meant in the time he hadn\'t moved to watch Fendis they had probably built up a bit.

This wasn\'t really a problem because they seemed to go for whoever was the closest meaning even if he didn\'t move all of them would eventually get over to him and Fendis but that was only if there weren\'t any people around that might accidentally draw them towards a less guarded place.

This could result in a disaster since he was now sure the place they were guarding was much worse than where the guards from the city were stationed because their guards probably weren\'t up to the task of dealing with this volume when it came down to it.

...

"This is worse than it\'s ever been." As he was watching the situation down in the city he couldn\'t help but say this out loud as he tried to think of possible explanations. When Hampton had decided to leave for a single night both of them had just assumed the amount of phantoms would be the same it had always been before Hampton had invented the Light formation that kept them from emerging.

It seemed they had been extremely wrong about this though and it made him think maybe the phantoms increased in number over time and not letting them out to be culled at least semi regularly had been a massive mistake.

"Mayor, sir, we\'re getting overrun it seems." Turning to see his head guard had just walked in he didn\'t try to pretend everything was fine because he knew the man would know just as well as he did that they needed to call for help right away.

"Get the communication formation in Hamptons lab ready. I\'m going to send out an emergency request." Hampton hadn\'t taken all the gold with him which left enough money to hire someone who could get here within a few minutes to deal with the problem. It was a real shame that they had messed up like this though because they really needed that money in case the people Hampton was off looking for asked for more than Hampton planned to tell them he had.