Alusion
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Announcement + Chapter Seventy-Seven: Collateral Damage
🕑 Added 2025-05-24 00:03:08 +0000 UTCHey everyone,
I’ve got an update today that I’ve been thinking about for a while, and I want to be upfront and honest about it: for the foreseeable future, Mistwoven Healer will be moving to a once-a-week update schedule instead of twice a week with releases happening on Friday for Patreon and Saturday for Royal Road.
This wasn’t an easy decision. I’ve put a lot of myself into this story, and I’m extremely proud of how far it’s come. However, I’ve also started to feel that creative spark dimming a bit. I’m not burnt out on writing itself — I still love telling stories — but I’ve been feeling stretched thin when it comes to Mistwoven Healer specifically, and I worry that it's starting to come across in my writing. Rather than keep forcing myself forward and risk burning out completely or compromising quality, I’m giving myself some breathing room.
During that extra time between chapters, I’ll also be working on some new projects that I’m genuinely excited about — Divinity Paradox included. I don’t expect everyone to follow me to those stories, but I hope some of you might. I’ll still be here, still writing, and still sharing what I can.
From the bottom of my heart, thank you all so much for sticking with me so far. This story has come a long way thanks to your support, and I hope you’ll enjoy what’s still to come — both in Mistwoven Healer and whatever comes after.
Now, enough of that! We've got a chapter to get on to!
— Alusion
Chapter Seventy-Seven: Collateral Damage
For long moments, we all stare in shock at the bullets pinging off of Haruto’s massive green shield of energy, the loud thunder of the automatic fire nearly deafening me. Somehow, despite Baylee’s suspicions, I never actually believed that it would really come to this. Sure, Captain Blake has been acting a little sketchy, but what kind of suicidal do you have to be to open fire on a group of sentinels!?
“What do we do!?” Haruto calls over the noise. “I can’t keep this shield up forever!”
His words are imminently true; even now, cracks are beginning to show in his barrier due to the barrage of automatic weapon fire. The cracks mend themselves as quickly as they form — Haruto keeping a tight grip on his hammer and his arms squeezed shut with focus — but even he can’t take this kind of sustained fire for too long.
Beside me, Baylee swallows, “I’m willing to bet that most of those soldiers have just been misled! I have a hard time believing that they’re all traitors! That, or the GDF actually has betrayed us!”
“Not likely!” Akari responds, her hand gripping mine in a tight squeeze. “If Nightsong wanted us dead, there would be no point to all of this!”
“Guys!” Haruto forces out through gritted teeth. “My barrier is failing; pick a plan of action soon!”
“We fight back!” Baylee yells after a moment. “Some of those soldiers might be innocents, and they might not! For now, we need to focus on our survival! Serena, give us to cover, then start picking them off! Akari, support her! The rest of you, open fire!” Baylee calls, sounding conflicted and yet determined.
I swallow; the idea of treating these soldiers like I’ve done the many groups of Volcora we’ve fought here makes my stomach churn with bile. Yet, it’s kill or be killed. I can cry and try to moralize all of this later; for now, I need to protect my team. Because the one thing I know for sure is that their lives are worth a hell of a lot more to me than any of these soldiers.
With a flicker of focus, I remove the soldiers as allies for my amulet that allows my friends to see through my mist, then I raise my hands and the world explodes with white. The hazy blue-light swirls of my mist enshroud my team and I as we begin to move, me and Akari slipping off to the side while my team members raise weapons towards the soldiers.
As soon as I turn towards the fighting, my bow raised and an arrow crackling with lightning, I realize that our enemies have been busy too. Well, busy running for it, I suppose. A group of nearly fifteen soldiers are sprinting for the aperture, barely seeming to care to look behind them. I nod my approval. If these soldiers aren’t in on whatever is going on here, then running is absolutely the right option.
Honestly, I’m not sure what they were thinking opening fire on us at all — even if they are all antagonistic. A team of sentinels against a group of soldiers… well, the only real question is how long it takes for the soldiers to meet their grizzly end. Already, I can see the slaughter beginning. Arrows of shimmering water and blasts of force are the first to impact the soldiers, and while Hayley’s attacks have grown stronger, Baylee’s are devastating. Men are thrown from their feet as their chests explode with gore, the remains of their tattered bodies slamming into their fellows with enough force to knock them from their feet as well.
Claire is already dashing forward, red lightning crackling around her, although I realize with a start that she isn’t moving to attack the men still firing on us but to intercept those trying to run. I frown as I watch her moving from the corner of my eye, even as I release a devastating arrow of my own into the opposing soldiers.
Why would Claire be trying to head off the soldiers trying to escape? Killing them isn’t our goal, is it? She wouldn’t be trying this without having been ordered by Baylee, which leads me to wonder what Baylee is seeing that I haven’t.
Almost immediately, all of the remaining soldiers shift their fire to Claire, hitting her personal assault state shield several times before Haruto conjures a barrier for her to shelter behind. This stops her progress and raises several questions.
First, how can they even see Claire right now? My mist should be obscuring her. The only way I can think of to get around that would be if they had some kind of inscribed item to act as a counter, which… well, any of the groups that might be attacking us would have the resources to get. However, the idea that they have countermeasures prepared specifically for me is chilling.
My second question is, why? Why even attack Claire when Baylee is currently the most dangerous threat on the field for these men? Right now, she’s focusing purely on her bolts through her staff, but I know that they’ve personally witnessed some of the nastier spells that Baylee has up her sleeve. If she decides there’s a genuine chance that we might lose, she will absolutely break them out.
I fire another arrow into the group of soldiers almost absently, still thinking over the problem, before my eyes go wide. Captain Blake seemed quite insistent on trying to get us to leave the incursion zone, but why would that be? Unless this ambush was meant to take place on the other side of the aperture, which means those men aren’t running for safety… they’re running for reinforcements.
“Help Claire stop those runners!” I yell to Akari over the sounds of the fight, the previously silent woods alive with conflict.
All around us, wooden huts are knocked over like sandcastles at the beach, and trees are riddled with bullets ricocheting off Haruto’s various shields, sending woodchips flying everywhere.
Akari gives me a nervous look, her expression showing her waring emotions between wanting to protect me and trusting my reasoning. After only a moment, though, trust wins out and Akari starts also sprinting toward the fleeing soldiers.
Nodding to myself, I slip through my mist to reappear behind Haruto, and then I close my eyes, focusing on an ability that I haven’t used much yet. Zephyr’s Edict is a bit of a strange power, its description mentioning things that I haven’t yet had a lot of time to explore. However, the core function of the power remains the same and is instinctual — if difficult — for me to use.
Closing my eyes, I infuse the ability into my mist, making the vapor briefly flash golden as threads of gold join the blue in weaving through the hazy cloud hovering around us. Once infused, I find myself able to sense the bullets as they zip through my mist to impact Haruto’s barrier protecting Claire, as well as the new one he was forced to conjure up to protect Akari. The bullets move through the mist incredibly quickly, zipping through and impacting the barriers so fast that I have trouble focusing on them. However, after just a few attempts, I find myself able to start nudging the bullets off-course as they head toward my team members. It’s not exactly easy, but it is possible.
Upon realizing that the storm of bullets is starting to let up, both due to my efforts and those of Baylee and Hayley working to thin the ranks of remaining soldiers, Claire and Akari are once again able to rush at the fleeing soldiers with incredible speed.
By now, the soldiers have nearly reached the aperture in the center of the village, having taken a wide path around us. Despite how close they are to freedom, however, Claire and Akari are supernaturally quick and are suddenly laying into the soldiers’ unprotected backs like a pair of wolves leaping on their prey.
Swords flash, lightning crackles, and men scream and die all around me as the fighting continues, a cacophony of suffering filling the forest as Team Picnic tears through the remaining soldiers like a hot knife through butter. With victory in sight, I feel myself start to relax, my mind beginning to work out whether or not it’s feasible to take one of these soldiers alive and see who they work for. Captain Blake would be an excellent person to interrogate if he’s still around and kicking.
Almost as fast as the fighting started, it ends as Haruto wraps the remaining soldiers still fighting in green bubbles of shield energy. The men scream and rage silently from within the shield bubbles, slamming their fists into the glowing walls impotently. However, after the first fires his weapon into the shield and finds the bullet bouncing around his small bubble before ripping into his flesh, the others start to realize the kind of situation they’re in.
Once again, I find myself… confused. They must have known they’d lose this fight, right? Is whatever they have waiting on the other side of that aperture really so dangerous that they would risk something like this? I mean, I’m certain it must be the other sentinel team waiting in the wings to support them, but they are down a member and will be brand-new sentinels besides. I just can’t see how this plan makes any kind of sense. Not unless there is some overwhelming force out there, too, but I can’t think of what that force might be.
“Did any get out!?” Baylee asks urgently as Claire and Akari jog back over. Their assault state outfits are practically drenched in blood.
“Hard to say,” Claire says, panting with the exertion of the fight. “They were right on top of that aperture when we finally got there. It’s possible one or two escaped, but it’s hard to know for certain.”
Baylee nods, “Haruto, finish off those soldiers and get ready to shield us. We could have enemy reinforcements flooding through that aperture any second!”
Haruto doesn’t say anything in response, simply looking over the three remaining men he holds, captured in glowing bubbles of force. Then, without so much as a flinch, he closes one of his hands into a fist.
In a single, viscerally horrible moment, the three globes of green light shrink to around the size of a basketball… with the men still inside. In an instant, Haruto reduces the captured soldiers into ground-down balls of blood and meat that fall to the ground with sickening splats as the green light vanishes.
I can’t help myself; I turn to the side and vomit at the sight, my stomach twisting with revulsion.
Like so many others, I’ve long been caught up in the ideas of noble battle, sentinels acting as heroes to fend off the evil Volcora and protect the innocent. Seeing that, though, I can’t help but wonder if we really are as bad as the Reavers make us out to be. Those men were helpless against us, and the moment their lives became a risk… an inconvenience… we killed them in an instant. No trial, no chance at reform. Just a simple, brutal execution.
In that moment, I find I no longer recognize the person I’ve become. How many people have I killed? How many people have my teammates killed? Sure, I feel bad about it, but wasn’t there a way out of this that didn’t involve massacring all these soldiers. This wasn’t even a fight, not really. We put these soldiers down like it was nothing… just another workday taking out volcora. Except these weren’t volcora, they were humans, and humans with untainted life forces at that. Perhaps they could have been saved? Maybe this whole thing was organized by that captain, and these others were just men and women doing their jobs.
A hand gently touches my shoulder as I wipe at my mouth, turning away from the mess I made. “I understand,” Akari says, even her voice trembling just slightly. “But I don’t think this is over.”
I frown and follow Akari’s gaze as she looks towards the swirling dark aperture. More soldiers are pouring out, and standing among them are figures dressed in dark assault states like those we found on the corpse in the entrance to this space. There are four of them, three men and one woman, each radiating Stygian Mana like dark beacons. From this distance, it’s hard to make out any small colors on their dark clothing to indicate sentinel colors, but these are, without a doubt, the sentinels we were hunting.
Beside me, Akari’s eyes go wide as she looks at the group entering the aperture — they keep coming and coming, although these “soldiers” do nothing to hide the taint in their life forces nor the tattoos covering their bodies.
“Serena!” Akari hisses, grabbing my arm. “The power suppression cuffs that ‘won’t work on us,’ the Reaver’s looking for sentinels! This isn’t an ambush meant to kill us; they’re trying to capture us!”
“I don’t know,” Claire says, stepping closer, her armor still dripping with viscera. “They sure look ready to kill.”
“Neither option sounds great,” Hayley squeaks, also stepping close.
“Focus up!” Baylee orders, her voice hard.
In an instant, all of us straighten, turning to her and wondering what she has planned that can possibly get us out of this.
“Serena, give us cover. We’ll escape into this forest and fight them with hit-and-run tactics as they give chase, like we were doing with the horde of volcora in Shirakaze before we got overwhelmed. If they really are fighting to capture and not kill, they’ll have to hold back at least a little. That will give us an advantage.”
“Baylee! They can see through my mist!” I say, raising my hands and conjuring up a cloud of cover anyway.
“Maybe only some of them can,” Baylee snaps, pointing to the side. “Come on, let’s go!”
Not having further time for discussion with the potential fight turning more and more disadvantaged with every moment, we do as Baylee said and run.
Ominously, as we dash away from the village and back out into the massive trees of the incursion zone forest, dozens of eyes track us even through my mist. Tattoos near their eyes light up with crackling dark mana as the massive group of Reavers watches us leave. None of them seem overly concerned with our running, and I can instantly tell why. Looking back, I see the group already starting to depart back outside the aperture once more.
“Shit!” Baylee curses, skidding to a stop and looking back at the retreating group with angry eyes. “They didn’t take the bait!”
“What do you mean?” Hayley asks. “Isn’t them leaving us alone a good thing?”
I shake my head, feeling chilled. “This incursion zone is breaking down with its anchor destroyed, and we’ll soon be forced back into our wider reality. If they wait for us at the aperture, they can set up a perfect ambush for us just outside the incursion zone. They know right where we’ll appear.”
Baylee nods, “That’s why Captain Blake wanted us to pass through the aperture so badly. If we did, we would have found an ambush in front of us and our own soldiers turning on us from behind.”
“Any ideas on what we do now?” Haruto asks stoically. “We can’t contact headquarters from within the incursion zone, and we’re on a ticking clock before we’re forced out there to face them. I’ll be honest, Baylee; I don't see a good way out of this. Unless Audrey or Kayne shows up to check on us — which is highly unlikely — this is going to be an almost impossible fight to win.”
Baylee visibly swallows but nods. “You’re right; for now, we have less than an hour before we’re forced outside the incursion zone. We need to take that time to rest and strategize. Remember, victory in this situation isn’t winning the fight that's coming; it’s breaking through their lines and getting help. For now, let’s rest up and go over our options. I’m certain we can think of something that can get us out of this.”
“And if we can’t!?” Akari demands, anger making her eyes glow violet.
Baylee lets out a long, slow breath. “If we can’t… then capture is better than death. We won’t go easy, but we know Serena can fix Stygian Mana corruption. As long as we’re still alive, we have a chance.”
Comments
Alusion
I'm really glad you liked Divinity Paradox! I've been working more on it today, as well as another short-form story (shorter chapters) like Mistwoven Healer. My eventual goal is to be regularly releasing Mistwoven Healer, this newer short-form story, and Divinity Paradox. It will be a lot of work, but also a ton of fun! By the way, the main difficulty with Divinity Paradox chapters right now is rewriting what I already have in the past tense, which I've decided to go with for my newer projects. Lately, I've been trying to get with the program and move my work toward the past tense as a whole to better match the community. Mistwoven Healer will be staying in the present tense, obviously, but everything else will be moving in that direction. Anyway, that's quite enough rambling from me. Just thought I'd provide a quick update. Thanks for your comment, and I'm so excited to share what I've been working on!
TheBotler
Looking forward to more divinity paradox in addition to everything else, this story included.
phantom
These Reavers don't seem the most intelligent. Though I guess that should be obvious from the pov we saw. Still how on earth do they have so many allies that even after Nightsong went on a cull they still have this many to spare?
