“Now… what should I do with them?” Muttering this question under his nose, Layn confirmed that no one was moving so far. Scanning the area with his eyes, he could see that out of about eleven people in the group, four were missing. Or rather, while everyone was standing and staring with bulging eyes at Layn, the four of the victims of the firedog’s flames could only lay still on the ground.

Once Layn’s sight swept past Irea, he noticed a huge, burnt mark on her arm. Stretching from her wrist as far as to the side of her waist and shoulder, it was clearly the source of the anguish written all over her face.

Taking a deep breath, Layn closed his eyes. Using the proper conducting element in his tool, he absorbed the remaining part of the refined energy from the air. Cutting a small wound open on his vein, he then extracted a thin strand made purely out of the stone dust, before connecting it to his blood flow.

Layn took a step forward.

“Kaka… who? Who are you?” After the momentary buzz, Layn’s translation spell fixed itself. Supplied with a fresh, abundant stream of mana, arcana’s potential instantly spiked. For as long as Layn could maintain the spell, he wouldn’t have any further problems communicating with others.

Layn took another step. Noticing the extremely cautious and focused look in the ancients’ leader eyes, he swept his rope to the side, only to let it curl around his body. In a moment, this simple rope wrapped itself around Layn’s torso. The energy around him constantly decreased, absorbed through the rope to his bloodstream.

“I’m Layn.” Leaving the job of translating his words to the spell, Layn took one last step. Reaching with his hand, he gently grabbed the fingers of the girl’s injured hand.

‘Recreate the symposium…’

The weirder the way to call a complicated spell, the easier it was for the modern caster to recall its structure. By imagining a hall full of academics in the sanitised suits, Layn could see all four rings of this fourth tier spell. Written atop the white cloth of the doctors’ aprons, they served only a single purpose.

Pushing his newly obtained energy through those rings, Layn allowed it to accumulate for a bit, before suddenly opening his squinted eyes. With all the four images falling on top of each other once this mental image collapsed, the complicated structure of the spell clicked.

“Wha…” As soon as the slight shine of the healing spell appeared all over Irea’s wound, the leader of her group jumped forward. The eyes of the girl herself widened in shock at first, only to widen even more once she realised what was going on.

With the warrior approaching along with his unsheathed spear, Layn observed the changes going on on the girl’s battered skin. In a set of motions too small to notice individually, her body seemed to repair itself. As if each of her bare cells suddenly exploded with energy, they would split and divide and split and divide…

By the time the tip of the spear started to threaten Layn’s safety, the spell reached the critical mass. With all the flesh tissue now regenerated, the remaining energy of this relatively strong arcana exploded, filling the girl with its physical manifestation.

“STOP!” In one instant, the girl pushed her hand forward. Grabbing the spear right behind its blade, she violently turned her body around, snapping the tip off the weapon. But that didn’t stop her leader’s lunge.

Pang!

The sound of the shattered end of the wooden pole bouncing off Layn’s most basic barrier didn’t even attract the archmage’s attention. Taking a close look at the state of the healed girl, he couldn’t fail to notice how certain part of her charms poked out of the hole in her clothes.

Turning his eyes away, Layn located the next victim. While his spell was potent, it was focused on healing, not reversing the time. Letting the girl duke it out with the leader, Layn moved on.

In the situation a few moments ago, no words would suffice to calm it. From the looks on the faces of the ancients, they were unable to decide whether to treat him as some expert or a gigantic threat. No matter how the archmage would want to explain or move on, they wouldn’t let him.

It was that stalemate that forced him to just shut up for the most part and give the message through his actions. With the language barrier keeping them from understanding each other only until a few moments ago, as long as he could get the ancients to calm down for a moment, Layn could obtain something that would be of great use for him.

A local guide to the nearest settlement, where he could use his bullshitting skills to somehow make a whole out of his entire situation.

Approaching the next victim, Layn kneeled on one knee in front of him. From the looks of things, while he received far greater injuries, they were mostly only on the surface. Maybe due to the way they used the sparse energy, but this man seemed way more resilient than the humans of Layn’s era.

‘Recreate the symposium…’

Closing his eyes only to open them a moment later, Layn invoked the heal once again. The sting on his veins was real. While the cloud of energy that followed him was now mostly absorbed, repeatedly using such an advanced spell without a stable supply of high-grade magic was still taxing.

Unable to react to Layn’s swift and decisive moves, the rest of the ancients could only watch how he healed another one of their victims only to stand up and move to the next. Layn hesitated only above the third of the injured that he approached.

Because to save him, he would have to somehow invoke a grade six spell. Something that even with countless resources that he had as the Kingdom’s archmage was still rather costly.

Shaking his head to communicate the situation to the injured girl, Layn lowered his head to her, before moving on. Rather than wasting time on the lethally injured female, he could still save the last of the victim.

“Who are you?” Once the last of the injured could now breathe a sigh of relief, Irea warily approached the archmage.

“I told you already, ” Layn replied while shaking his head to get rid of the dizziness. Using the heal four times in a row, he barely had any mana left.

“I’m Layn.”