DB Lazarus
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55. At the Brink - II
🕑 Added 2025-03-13 01:00:01 +0000 UTCI touched his shredded abdomen with my blood-soaked fingertips. The moment my hands contacted his blood-soaked clothes, the potion called to me. This time, I didn’t deny it, not that I had a choice. By not closing myself off, I must have opened myself up. He was too injured, and the potion, too concentrated. As soon as [Enhance Medicinal] activated, information flooded my mind.
When I had previously used potions on a wound, I could see each individual tissue layer in my mind. At times, I felt that manipulating individual cells was just within my grasp. It was awe-inspiring—and 100% not what was happening here. Now, I drowned in details. His blood was awash with potion, and it was working…everywhere. With time, I could sort it out, but I didn’t have that.
Slow time? Too energy-consuming. Maybe if I get closer? The details fade with distance.
I tore open what remained of his shirt. Someone behind me groaned in dismay. Yes, it was that bad. Exposed viscera. Far too much blood pooling. While I had seen wounds of this caliber before—not too hard when after doing a surgical year at a major trauma center—the outcomes tended towards poor.
I put my dirty—yes, dirty—hands into his largest wound, a fist-sized hole in the middle of his abdomen. He didn’t have time for me to wash them, and with the amount of damage done, his abdomen was so far from sterile.
I tried again. Lots of internal bleeding and organ damage, but so much noise still came through. I didn’t have the resolution I wanted. I would’ve killed for a CT scan to get a sense of his abdomen. But did I need it? Potions didn’t need direction to work.
I activated [Enhance Medicinal], targeting an area with significant damage deep in his abdomen. My Mark engaged, but instead of a smooth flow, the skill stuttered. I pushed against the resistance, channeling more Energy. It responded, but at a fraction of its normal strength. Still, it did work. Injuries started to fade. I jammed more Energy into the skill. My connection began to strengthen, the metaphorical pathway widening to all more Energy—until the skill just failed.
All the channeled Energy rebounded, sending a spike of fire through my temple. I immediately stopped using the skill, blinking away stars and cursing my stupidity. Brute force hadn’t worked for the light stone, so why would it with something infinitely more complicated?
I took a deep breath, centering myself. Skills were tools, and I was using mine thoughtlessly. As Dorian had alluded to multiple times, my Projection sucked. It shouldn’t be a wonder that the skill fought me at range. My control should weaken the further from my hands. My Projection just couldn’t push the skill far enough. Before, failing to light a stone had meant nothing but frustration. Now, failure meant death. I couldn’t afford another catastrophic failure. If I could push my limit—and that remained a clear question—I couldn’t do it with abandon.
At least, my Perception and Processing exceeded the norm. An elevated Perception had to explain the sheer amount of information bombarding me, and given my abysmal Projection, it should come as no surprise that I could sense farther—much farther—than I could act. But how did Processing interact with the two? Did Processing help with…well, processing sensory inputs?
I took a moment to examine the information coming to me via my new “sixth sense.” So much damage, but more existed beyond that. I let everything I detected seep into my awareness. As I did, a cold sensation spread across my temple and forehead. A mental map of his abdomen began to form. The resolution diminished with distance from my hands, but with effort, I could bring greater detail to a section. However, even then, much of the area, even the part closest to men, remained incomplete.
I studied the phenomenon, and the reason why clicked. The “sixth sense” only detected injuries. Even with so many wounds, much of his abdomen remained dark. I paused, taking time to study the information voids. They weren’t completely empty of information. Subtle strands of something permeated the dark spaces. They varied in size, with an almost organic structure…
Vessels!
I played a hunch, trickling a bit of Energy into [Enhance Medicinal], and immediately the ghostly strands burst into vivid gold, filling in the voids. As I sustained the skill, even finer filaments resolved to create a fine latticework.
I took a moment to marvel at what I had managed. I was overlaying the information from [Enhance Medicinal] and this new extrasensory perception to turn the healing potion into an equivalent of a contrast agent. The potion, like IV contrast agents in CTs and MRIs back home, lit up his vessels and areas with inflammation. When I combined this information with my awareness of injuries, I had a real-time view of his wounds healing. However, given how much healing potion he had consumed, it started to seep into areas without injury. It lacked any significant detail, though it did provide a vague sense of an area’s structure—and context.
Not all lacerations were the same. A lacerated artery carried a different prognosis than a lacerated small bowel. Without any visual confirmation, I needed some structure to ground the injuries I was picking up. The current state could work, but could I do better?
I flexed [Enhance Medicinal], trying to heal the uninjured tissue. Info on the targeted area surged into my mind—though from an unexpected source. My sixth sense started to scream as I further empowered the potion’s effects in healthy tissue. I reversed the use of the skill, going from longer enhancing to actively suppressing the action of the potion. First, the area went dark, and then as I swung the pendulum in the other direction, a trickle of information entered my mind. Using the skill provided information on the affected tissue, but it paled in comparison to the detail obtained when I detected injuries. At least it gave me a method to “scan” people that didn’t involve poisoning them. However, what did that say about possible deleterious effects of long-term potion use?
Not now, Daniel. Your hærlið is bleeding out before you, and you still don’t have a method to fix him. You need to focus and break things down.
[Enhanced Medicinal] failed. Why? Experiments were in order, but my money was on control—whether that came from distance or complexity. The rebound implied that Energy probably didn’t matter—at least not initially.
How do I improve control?
Throughout all this, one rule has always applied: distance mattered. The closer the injured tissue, the crisper the mental image. Of the six Potentials governing skills, one was dedicated to range limitations. Distance mattered. Sure, concentration mitigated the distance penalty, but as the light stones showed, there were hard limits. However, even with the potion acting as a conduit, I couldn’t afford any unnecessary drain on my cognitive reserves, not with the amount I needed to heal. Pushing a skill outside its normal limit to have perfect information--too costly. While nowhere near the level of accessing [Eidetic Memory] while in that flow state, controlling [Enhance Medicinal], filtering the info it provided, and managing this awareness of injuries strained my mind too much. It also did nothing to guarantee that I could safely act on what I perceived. My very limited range sufficed for surface wounds, but here…
I once more cursed my lack of knowledge on my Potentials and how they affected my abilities. It was going to get our hærlið killed, but I rescheduled my pity party for a later date. In the end, I really had only two viable options: increase the time I had to process—or perhaps more appropriately filter—all the information or get closer to the source.
I shook my head. Only one option dealt with the limitations my Projection placed on me, and it wasn’t going to be pretty. What I would give to be able to tell the anesthesiologist to hang some broad-spectrum antibiotics.
“Rægnor, I have to go in. When I ask for a potion, put it in my left hand. Also, don’t let anyone disrupt me. He is delicate enough as it is.” Again, for some reason, my forehead grew cool as I spoke.
Another mystery for another time.
No time for second-guessing. I shoved my sleeve up and plunged my hand into his abdominal cavity. The hærlið howled, muscles clamping down like a vise. Blood—hot, thick, too much—spilled over my wrist.
Fuck, no anesthesia. How had I forgotten that?
His abdominal wall tensed, generating a loud squelch as too much blood spilled from the weeping orifice. I pushed down the nausea and the flicker of doubt. The damage was done. Stopping would just worsen it. I had to put the rest of my faith in the power of these healing potions.
With my hand inside his abdominal cavity, information flooded me again. Each bit had value—none of it was good.
“Tell me you have a plan,” Rægnor growled, his grip tightening on the tourniquet. “If you don’t…” His eyes flickered toward the Ættir behind me.
Yeah, I don’t need the reminder. What I need is time to think.
Something responded to the crisis, and this time, I didn’t try to prevent whatever process allowed my thinking to accelerate. My headache only increased, but I welcomed the familiar throb. It grounded me in reality. Otherwise, I might have lost myself in all the information my senses took in…and the horror of his wounds.
It was as if a bomb had gone off inside of him. He had a grade IV liver laceration and a splenic injury, likely bordering grade V. He was hemorrhaging from both of those. He got lucky that the kidney’s bleeding was contained as a capsular hematoma. Still, all that didn’t even take into account the large stone dagger sitting next to his aorta, multiple bowel perforations, and the wrongness that meant a brewing infection permeating his entire cavity and, surprisingly, his lungs.
Had he aspirated? More importantly, could I fix this?
This would be too much for a single trauma surgeon. She would need backup from a vascular surgeon to repair the damage to the vasculature at the minimum. At home, many might have just called him. We did that in other cases. We aborted surgeries to resect ovarian cancer right after the opening because we found that the cancer had metastasized to the entire peritoneum. This wasn’t futile, but it was damn close.
Just take the spleen. It was shot and needed resection, not something I couldn’t exactly manage with my bare hands. Or could I? Could I just rip it out? What were the limits of a healing potion? In the worst case, ligating an arterial stump had to be easier than fixing an entire spleen, right?
I tamped down my intellectual curiosity. Even if I had the strength to do that, the damage, not to mention the pain, from maneuvering my hand around... No, not a road I wanted to go down, especially when a [Healer] could potentially regenerate his entire spleen. The ethical quandaries potions and magics could create…
Focus. I had time for philosophizing later. First, did I have consent? Unnecessary in an emergent situation. Second, did I know the scope of his injuries? I flexed my awareness and [Enhance Medicinal] once more and took in the devastation inside his abdomen. Yes, as much as I needed. Finally, did I have the assets to overcome it?
Potions and bare hands…
If I could have moved, hints of a smile would have crept over my face as a thrill long forgotten bubbled up. How long had it been since I faced a challenge like this? My doomed year of surgical residency? I could do this. I just had to keep him alive long enough for the truly miraculous healing to occur. I couldn’t guarantee it, but I could provide him a chance—a damn good chance. If his anatomy wasn’t so human, then no, but it was practically textbook—Earth textbook. And thanks to this flow state, I had time to think.
I activated [Enhance Medicinal], and its magic surged into the potion surrounding my hand. Again, my Projection limited my range, but a thin tendril jutted out from my sphere of influence. Steeped in his potion-soaked blood, I could stretch my skill outward as long as I followed the vasculature. I dropped deeper into my flow state to really examine that assertion and found a more nuanced reason. The scope of my skill is related to the potion’s concentration gradient. It just happened that most remained in his blood, which, thankfully, the vast majority still resided inside his blood vessels.
With a thought, I stretched my skill to his spleen and liver. I had to curtail the worst of the bleeding. [Enhanced Medicinal] pulled Energy from me and channeled it into the potion. The mysterious compound surged in effectiveness, knitting torn tissue. However, the recovery was anemic, a far cry below what I had managed with my other attempts at using my skill on healing potions. Why? The distance? Or something else?
In desperation, I forced more Energy into the skill. [Enhance Medicinal] responded, though at the cost of feedback. The rate of regeneration increased, but Energy began to rebound back along the pathways between my fingers and brain. With effort, I could smooth out the dissonant spikes, but it was like dragging a rake across my brain. Still, with each repeated act, the process became marginally easier. My mental image sharpened. The spikes of pain dulled. The Energy flowed smoother. I wasn’t just using the skill—I was shaping it.
I dropped back into a flow state, and my world went white. However, clarity soon returned as my concentration held. The flow of his blood slowed to a crawl, then froze. I pushed at the skill, keeping in mind my theories on how potions worked and found…flexibility?
While nothing happened in real-time, the skill still provided feedback. If I stretched my command over the potion to multiple areas, my control of the skill began to fray. Still, I managed three. I knew with certainty that I only needed a few thoughts to supercharge the potion effects in each location simultaneously. The skill even provided a sense of the mental toll my actions would inflict. Whether I could queue action in this state remained to be seen, and that test would have to wait. First, I need to use this feedback from [Enhance Medicinal] to test options.
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Delagator
Wait, no! I need to know!
