Salt and Blood - Chapter 167

Rose truly could find no better way to

<< Chapter 166 | Table of Contents | Chapter 168 >>

2.73 - The Burning of Nirodas

Nations rise and fall in the blink of an eye. Those that stand the test of time are often not the most innovative or mighty, but those who keep to themselves

-Quoted from an unknown source

Rose truly could find no better way to describe the horror that had befallen Nirodas than with the word ‘hell’. What had once been a magnificent city—truly the crown of Derridas—was now a raging inferno of death and despair.

The strange red and blue flames covered the entire city and the fields surrounding it, turning what had once been a thriving hub of commerce and culture into a dead zone. Rose had made it out, but the cost was great.

Over half the divine energy she’d painstakingly absorbed had been used up, her fresh skin stung in the hot air, and her mind and body were stretched to the limits of exhaustion. It would take days to recover.

She wondered if anyone else survived. Unlike her homeland, there were a few powerful people in Nirodas who should have been able to make it out.

At least, that was what she hoped. Rose had relied on her divine energy to escape. She doubted anyone else had such a useful tool, so perhaps even those with cores far beyond hers had succumbed to the raging blaze.

Her gaze travelled over the burning wreckage, to the seas beyond. She stilled when her eyes found the blurry outline of at least a dozen ships on the horizon.

The flags and design of the ships was impossible to make out at this distance, but Rose didn’t need to see in order to know who was sailing them. Who had done… this.

Skill up!
Flame Resistance 21 > 22

Another delayed whorl splashed in her ears, but Rose ignored it as she had most of the others. She was grateful for the boon of the tide. Without the flame resistance she might not have survived.

Yet it wasn’t the time to be focusing on her own strength. How many lives had just been lost. No, not lost—stolen.

Murdered.

She heard a scream in the distance. A figure stumbled out of the wall of flames. Rose leapt into action.

She raced towards them, already gathering arcane and divine energy to save their life from the inferno that was consuming their body. “Here! Towards me!” she yelled.

The person collapsed into her arms. She winced as the flames burned her skin, but immediately used her own energy to snuff out the flames.

They were tenacious, putting up a fight as she attempted to do so. However, separated from the main inferno they were unable to resist her efforts. When the flames died down, Rose held a charred body in her arms.

“Can you hear me? I don’t… I can’t heal you, I-” her words died in her throat. What had she expected?

Dousing the flames with her energy wasn’t too difficult, but she had no idea how to heal damage of this magnitude. Not for another person, anyway. Her own body was another matter.

Sure, she had Arcane Field Medicine at level three, but what good was ‘field’ healing for something like this. She held the burned person in her arms, a tear rolling down her cheek.

They opened their mouth, the simple movement clearly causing them immense pain. A hoarse choking noise came out as they tried and failed to raise a hand.

Then Rose felt them fall still. She stood there, hugging a charred corpse for longer than was appropriate, reeling from the rawness of it all.

About thirty minutes later, she let it fall. It crumbled into ash and dust as soon as it hit the ground. A life snuffed out. Robbed.

She clenched her fists, staring at the ships in the distance. They had sailed closer since unleashing the blast, almost fifty of them visible. An unstoppable fleet, especially with Nirodas decimated.

“Those evil bastards,” she said with cold fury. “They will pay for this.”

During her escape it hadn’t crossed her mind, but Rose and her uncle weren’t the only ones in the city. Everyn. Daniel. Jason. All those who had come from the Emerlan Isle to lay the foundations of their nation’s freedom.

The harbour was hidden from where she stood, beneath the cliffs. Had their ship escaped the blast?

A slim, foolish hope that they had perhaps headed for the ship instead of the mansion where they were housed entered her mind. A naive wish, but she clung to it as she started to make her way back towards the burning rubble.

The arcane flames had died down now, no longer a blazing pyre of death and magic. The heat was oppressive, but not life threatening.

No buildings remained standing. The once grand palace, the city hall, the crafter’s quarter, the merchant district, the taverns, the homes. All had been vaporised.

In fact, calling it rubble wasn’t really accurate. Ash was all that remained. Ash and horror.

As she walked, she felt the arcane energy in the air. In the moment it had been turbulent and hungry, an all consuming force that wanted to drain the life from her. No longer.

It felt… wrong.

Something was distinctly off about the sensation. As a test, Rose attempted to draw some of the energy into her core. Her circuits screamed in protest the moment the first drop passed through her skin.

Rose purged it as soon as she felt the pain, but the damage was already done. A few inches of her circuits that the tainted energy had passed through were burnt black, faintly glowing with a hellish red glow.

When she attempted to circulate her own energy through that section, she let out a piercing scream. It was an agony unlike anything she’d experienced. The pain seemed to echo through her flesh and into her very soul, tearing her apart from within.

When she was able to focus once more, she realised with horror that the damage had spread. Rose was grateful for her foresight in absorbing it through her pinky finger. Only a small section of her hand had been corrupted, rather than a more vital area.

I definitely won’t be messing with that energy again, she promised herself, quickening her pace so that she didn’t have to spend a moment longer than necessary in the ruins of Nirodas.

An agonising few minutes later she had made it to the edge of the cliffs. The scorched earth spread almost all the way to the edge, the corrupted energy weaker but still filling the air here.

The only blessing was the sea breeze that tousled her hair and kissed her lips with salt. A hollow blessing after what had just happened.

Rose looked down, hoping against all the odds that perhaps some of her crew had survived on the ship. She let out a sigh of relief when she saw it was floating there in the docks, undamaged.

The same couldn’t be said for the other ships nearby. Those will sails unfurled had them torn from their masts. Some of the weaker masts had even been snapped off, while anything not tied down had been blown overboard.

A stream of lost cargo and a few… Rose realised there were bodies floating amongst the wreckage. Those too weak to resist even the blast the initial explosion had caused.

It didn’t take long to make it down the path from the top of the cliff. Every step she felt the faint ray of hope grow brighter. She felt… positive about what she was going to find.

An inexplicable sensation that told her things weren’t as… doomed as they seemed. She tried to push it away, knowing that hope was only going to sting all the more when she found nothing but an empty ship.

There were a few dishevelled sailors walking around. Most of them didn’t seem horrified or traumatised, only… lost.

They wandered around, occasionally picking up rubble and wreckage, carrying it aimlessly before depositing it elsewhere. There was no purpose to their actions. It was just a way for them to stop thinking about the tragedy they’d just lived through.

“Girl! You came from the city. What… what happened? My wife and daughter, they–” his words died in his throat as he saw Rose’s grimace.

“I’m sorry,” she said, wiping a tear from her cheek. “There were no… No survivors. The whole city is gone.”

That was all she managed to say before she steeled herself and rushed away. She couldn’t face that hopeful old man, because it was as though she was looking in a mirror.

Rose placed a hand against the ladder that led onto the ship. It was hot to the touch, the metal still cooling after the blast. Not too hot to climb, though.

The final step was difficult. Rose hauled herself onto the deck, still clinging to that faint hope despite her better instincts telling her it was foolish to do so. It took a few seconds to even raise her eyes and look around the deck.

When she finally did so, taking in the scene, she was… She felt nothing. There was no one to be seen. A few of the planks had splintered, but that was all.

Her gaze fell on the ladder leading to the decks below. She swallowed, clenching a fist and taking a deep breath. Maybe…

<< Chapter 166 | Table of Contents | Chapter 168 >>