Mina was coming down the stairs with James, Junior in one hand and little Deepam in the other. Indira trailed behind her, taking the steps slowly and carefully at Mina’s insistence.

  Then it happened. There was a colossal, explosive sound from outside.

  Mina’s breathing quickened. Her grip tightened on the babies, until Junior made a small noise and drew her attention to it.

  “Sorry, baby,” she said quietly, relaxing a bit.

  Mina forced herself to descend the stairs at the same rate as before, even as her heart pounded. She didn’t want to get too far ahead of Indira, lest the little girl trip and fall without anything in front of her to stop her descent.

  When the group finally reached the bottom of the stairs, Mina shifted the babies into one arm while she opened the door.

  She almost dropped them when she saw the scene outside.

  Mina reminded herself to breathe, and then she stood very still and tried to understand the scene.

  From the part of the Fisher Kingdom that bordered the former Haunted Forest, to an area of the forest itself stretching to perhaps forty feet away from the border with the Fisher Kingdom, there was a terrible radius of destruction.

  There was no better word to describe what had happened to the landscape other than “flattened.”

  The trees within the circle of debris had been smashed. Not cut down but crushed to bits, as if stepped on by a giant boot.

  A handful of people near the border space staggered around, plucking thick clumps of splinters from their exposed flesh. A few dead bodies littered the ground closer to the crushed space. One had a thick hunk of wood protruding from his or her head, completely obliterating the face. The two closest bodies were practically pulped, reduced to puddles of blood and dark substances, bits of broken bone sticking out of the nearby ground like strange crops.

  And just to the side of the forest, on the edge of what appeared to be a circular zone of destruction, there was a newly erected apartment building. One of the walls had been sheared away by whatever force had destroyed that hunk of forest and killed those people. The interior of the building now stood exposed to the open air, half a staircase intact jutting into nowhere.

  There was an open living room and an open kitchen on the two floors.

  Were there people in those rooms too?

  Some catastrophe that Mina did not understand, that she had no words for, had struck, seemingly at random, right in the middle of the Fisher Kingdom.

  Wait. Something like this happened without James stopping it? James…

  “Oh my gosh…” Mina murmured.

  “What’s that?”

  Mina spun around and grabbed the little girl who was peeking out from behind her dress. She covered Indira’s eyes and began whispering to her.

  “That’s nothing for you to see, little one. You have to keep your eyes covered for me, all right? I’m going to figure out what’s happened.”

  “Uh, okay,” the little girl said.

  Mina saw Indira’s fingers immediately begin to part as the child tried to get a better look at the carnage. She spun Indira around and whispered again.

  “No, really, Indira, you can’t look, okay. I’m going to walk you out there backwards, so just behave yourself and don’t try.”

  The little girl nodded, and Mina began pushing her backward, one hand on the top of Indira’s head, the other gripping the two babies as tightly as she could.

  The awkward foursome made their way across the ground slowly and laboriously. Despite minor stumbles, Mina managed to avoid either her or Indira falling. As they drew closer to the scene of carnage, Mina deviated in their course.

  The school and daycare buildings were undamaged by the event that had flattened the forest, and Mina now approached the front door to the daycare and knocked.

  The door was almost immediately pulled open by a young woman with a worried expression on her face.

  “What’s going on out here?” the woman asked in a hushed tone. “We told the children everything is all right, but some of them have tried to run away. We’re barely keeping things under control. The noise spooked everyone.”

  Mina looked at her and said, “We don’t know yet. Take these children. I’m going to investigate.”

  The woman looked like she wanted to discuss the matter earlier, but Mina gave her a look that said she was not in the mood to have a long conversation. Then the daycare worker nodded, took one child in each arm, and turned back into the building.

  Indira looked up at Mina.

  Mina could tell the child was trying not to let her eyes wander over to the destruction visible just behind Mina, so she placed a gentle hand on Indira’s cheek, guiding the girl’s face away from the grim sight.

  “Follow her,” Mina said quietly, pointing after the daycare woman. “You’ll be safe here.”

  “You’ll come back?” Indira asked, suddenly intelligent and earnest as a child beyond her years.

  Mina nodded without hesitation. “I will.”

  “Okay.” Indira nodded back and then turned to pursue the daycare woman. As Indira was stepping away, another female figure appeared.

  “What happened?” Yulia asked. “People are—”

  “I know,” Mina interrupted. “People are freaking out. I don’t know what happened; I’m about to investigate. If you’re free, you can come with me. We might need healing. But whatever’s going on out here, you need to know it’s ugly.”

  Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

  Yulia looked into Mina’s eyes for a moment, then nodded. She stepped out and closed the door behind her, and the two women walked out toward the border space that had been destroyed. There were many onlookers now, but none of these people got too close. They instinctively stood back, forming a ring around the place of destruction.

  Mina and Yulia pushed gently through the loosely packed crowd, and they stepped into the edge of the circle. Yulia could now see the same horrific spectacle that had presented itself to Mina a few minutes earlier.

  Maimed people sat, dazed, staring at nothing, bodies still dotted all over with huge splinters of wood. Those less fortunate lay in chunky pieces on the ground. A few of the most grievously wounded who were still living were being healed first by the small number of Healers who had responded first to the grisly scene. Slow progress was being made, but the overall impression was of having stepped into the middle of some sort of open air slaughterhouse.

  The earth was soaked with blood, and more was being added to it as those who had not been healed yet continued bleeding profusely.

  “Oh my God,” Yulia said, putting a hand over her mouth.

  “Mina, Yulia, it’s good to see you.”

  The two women looked up from the gruesome display to see Chief Leo DaSilva of the Fisher Kingdom’s police.

  It must have been him who told the crowd to stay back and asked for volunteers. Good old Leo.

  “Good to see you, too, Leo,” Mina said.

  Yulia just nodded and slowly swallowed a lump in her throat.

  “I’ve been meaning to come around and ask how you’ve been doing, Yulia,” Leo asked in a friendly tone of voice. “I won’t bother now. I wish we could see each other under better circumstances. Are you two able to help us with this? I know you can both heal.”

  Mina nodded, and Yulia nodded after her.

  “Yulia can do some healing, I think,” Mina said. “I’m a little worried about what might have gone on further into the forest.”

  She had a bad feeling that she could not quite explain.

  Leo nodded thoughtfully. “So you’re going to take a look and see if anyone’s still alive in the middle of that.” He gestured at the flattened space behind him. “Do you want an escort? We still don’t know what did this—or at least I don’t.”

  Mina shook her head. “I don’t think I need one. If it was enemy action, I’ll defend myself. But something like this—it’s hard for me to imagine that any normal kind of magic did it. There’s only one thing I can think of that could have.”

  Leo’s expression took on a look of realization. He mouthed the words, “The System?”

  Mina nodded. She sensed Yulia’s shocked reaction in her peripheral vision, but Mina did not have time to explain to the two of them what was, at most, a hastily cobbled together conclusion. She only had time for what was urgent.

  “If you have a spare man or two, send one to fetch Zora—James’s mother,” Mina said. She gestured in the direction of Zora’s laboratory.

  Leo looked confused for a moment.

  “She raises the dead,” Yulia said in a low voice.

  “Oh,” said Leo. “Right.”

  “I think we might have some need of her,” Mina said flatly. “Or at least I think James would want her to be available to those who might wish to make use of her services.”

  “Okay, that’s your call,” said Leo respectfully. He turned his head and barked an order. “Fitzgerald, you’re to go and get the Fisher King’s mother. Zora’s her name! Ask directions if you need to. She has a laboratory in that direction!”

  A young man with a head of sleek, slicked back hair that reminded Mina of an otter got up from attending the wounded and then rushed away at Leo’s command.

  “I’m glad we have you here right now, Leo,” Mina said.

  “Of course,” he replied. He lowered his voice. “Um, is the King somewhere?”

  “That’s what I’m wondering,” Mina said, her face contorting with worry.

  Leo looked like he wanted to say something kind, but she didn’t bother with any more discussion. At that point, she felt that she had stayed in place too long already. She sprang forward and rushed past the dead and the wounded, heading into the former Haunted Forest.

  The ground was littered with hunks of broken timber, like someone had unleashed an army of beavers to demolish the forest and they had just left their handiwork strewn all over the ground. She hopped from one piece of log to another, stepping onto whatever branches and bits of trunk looked stable enough to hold her weight.

  More than once, she went down, and the second time, she scraped her hands enough to draw a little blood, but she never let herself slow down, and she never stopped searching.

  Mina’s eyes constantly darted around, looking for any sign of the most important person in her world.

  “James,” she said under her breath. “James, where are you?”

  Her mind was whirling with fear and doubt.

  She knew that James could normally see and hear anything that was important to him within the Fisher Kingdom. In the case of a crisis like this, if he wasn’t active helping rescue people and reassuring the public, it would be because he was observing the situation with his powers and figuring out the best course of action.

  Unless he’s hurt. Badly hurt. Or worse…

  Mina shook her head. She wouldn’t allow herself to even think it.

  “Focus, Danailova,” she said to herself. “Wait, no, I’m Robard now!” She smiled despite her present sense of desperation. That was one good thing to come out of the System’s descent.

  Then her eyes opened wide. She saw a pop of red, just a body’s length away.

  Her eyes followed the spurt of color along a piece of wood to where it originated, just underneath the rubble of this strange disaster.

  Mina darted over to the wood and began clearing away the debris with her bare hands. She didn’t slow down, or even really notice, as the jagged chunks of tree splintered her hand. She only threw on the brakes when she saw a piece of brown flesh. It was slowly but surely pulsating blood.

  This arm is too thin to be James’s.

  She uncovered the stump and then saw the shape of a larger figure begin to reveal itself. This body, she recognized immediately. She immediately placed a hand on his back, slipping it in between the shattered chunks of armor that covered most of his torso, over where his heart should be.

  Some of the tension went out of Mina’s body as she felt the slow, ragged pulse.

  Still alive. My crazy husband is still alive.

  She smiled again, tears rising at the edges of her vision.

  James had thrown himself over the top of the other, smaller person, so that only the stump arm Mina had seen initially was exposed.

  Mina took a deep breath and slowly let it out. Then she examined James’s condition.

  It wasn’t good. She could tell at a glance that his arms and legs were broken, and everything that hadn’t been covered in armor was heavily bruised. The armor itself was shattered, but it had mostly protected what lay underneath it, although Mina saw a couple of places where the armor itself had been driven shallowly into James’s flesh.

  She began Laying on Hands immediately, starting with James’s head. That had taken some of the worst bruising, and Mina imagined that if it had taken serious damage that went untreated, her husband might never wake up.

  Her hands shook slightly as she gently applied the green aura of healing magic to her husband’s most vital area, but she felt a calm settling in her heart. She knew what she could do to help. James was still alive. Everything would be okay.

  Mina could already guess who would be beneath James—he would not have thrown himself over just anyone’s body—and she planned to heal Zora too.

  But James had certainly taken the brunt of the damage here. And Mina wasn’t married to Zora.

  “You two are both going to be all right,” Mina said softly. “Just fine. Wake up soon, okay, skapi? Wake up very soon…”