Luvi’s dream began as most did, with her being somewhere and not knowing exactly why. She was in a market that was packed with traffic that had come to a stop. She wondered why everyone had stopped. Then she heard a scream. She pushed past the crowd and saw that a large wagon had collapsed and a man was crushed under it. His legs were stuck under the wagon and he was wailing away and screaming for help. All the while a teenage boy tried lifting the wagon on his own. It would have been amusing to see the kid struggle if the situation hadn’t been so morbid.
“Someone help my Uncle!” he shouted with desperation. Once the initial shock wore off, plenty of people circled around and tried lifting the wagon but they didn’t have much luck. Even Luvi joined in, though it looked like they weren’t lifting that wagon so long as it had its cargo. What was the cargo anyways? It turned out to be a bunch of heavy rocks. No wonder it had collapsed. Who in their right mind would want all these rocks anyways?
Armed with the power of magic, Luvi used strength runes on her legs to give her extra lifting power but even those didn’t do much. Sure she was ten times stronger than she was without the runes. One extra person worth of lifting power was not significant when dealing with this much weight. But what if she could multiply the strength of a couple of others? She scanned the helpers that were frantically trying to unload the wagon and picked out the burliest of the bunch. If her runes magnified proportional to a person’s base strength then they would be the best candidates for runes.
“I have an idea,” Luvi announced, “I can use magic to make you stronger and then maybe we can lift the wagon!” The problem wasn’t that there weren’t enough people to help. The problem was that there wasn’t enough room for enough people to grab onto. Luvi could tell that they were reluctant to agree, but the sobbing boy and the shallow breaths of the uncle were all the convincing they needed. It was agree to be beefed up or get ridiculed for refusing to help an old man and his nephew.
Luvi had never placed strength runes on others before. She had never placed runes on multiple people either. Her spark was excited to try it out though and was practically salivating at using its magic to help someone. To be a savior was its ultimate reason for existing. Luvi had her reservations but this seemed like an emergency so she let the spark use up her magical energy and imbued four pairs of legs with somewhat powerful strength runes. She intended to imbue ten people in total but that was simply not going to happen if she was feeling the overstepping effects after only four. She had to settle for that. It was lucky that Luvi had erred on the cautious side because she neglected to apply a rune of resistance. These lifters would certainly feel leg pain for the following days due to their bodies not being resistant to the magic. “Now lift like you’ve never lifted before!”
The group of helpers lifted with all their might and the wagon began to budge. Just when it had lifted enough, the teenage boy pulled his uncle out from under the wagon and a wagon took him to the nearest medical facility. Luvi would have tried to heal him had she not seen just how bad his legs had become. Everyone was cheering and saying how her magic had saved the day but she was starting to feel more mentally fatigued with every passing minute. She hadn’t experienced delayed onset of overstepping before. It must have been caused by using so much ether at once. Now she knew that if she was going to use a lot of ether at once that she was going to have to do it in small bursts.
The headaches eventually plateaued and Luvi considered herself lucky that she didn’t go into the moderate overstepping range. She felt dizzy and her legs felt numb to the touch. She couldn’t even remember most of what had happened over the next few hours. When she regained her bearings, she realized that she was sitting in a hospital bed with a cloth wrapped around her head.
“What happened,” she asked a nurse.
“They said you overexerted yourself,” the nurse said, “we don’t know how to treat you so we just let you lay down and rest. How are you feeling?” The nurse didn’t seem very worried and was just checking boxes off of piece of paper. She looked eager to get back to patients that needed immediate attention.
“I feel better,” Luvi said as she pressed onto her legs. They weren’t numb anymore but the headaches persisted. She couldn’t even feel her spark. Had it gone dormant from being overworked? She laid back down and tried to get some rest but sleep wouldn’t come. Her mind kept going back to the wagon incident. Was there anything she could have done better? Would have been better to have just broken the man’s legs and gotten him faster medical attention? She supposed they could have also tried just pulling the man out with brute strength. She didn’t know what the right answer was but she couldn’t help but feel discontent with how things had turned out.
A couple hours passed and Luvi finally felt about ready to go home. It wasn’t like she was doing anything but sulking and listening to the screams of patients in pain. It didn’t do very well for her mood to be hanging around here. Just before she left she passed by the same teen from the wagon incident.
“How’d your uncle turn out,” she asked. She assumed that he had survived. It would have been unacceptable for her to have gone though all that effort only for him to have died. It would have shocked her just as much as the time she had tried to heal a diseased man to no avail.
“They say he’ll be fine,” he said, “but he won’t walk again. Thanks for helping back there by the way. They say it’ll be a lot less painful to do a procedure here than if they had to go out there to do it.” He wasn’t crying but it was easy to see that he had been. His eyes were bloodshot and his face had dried tears marks all over. Luvi patted him on the head and wished him well before going off on her way. It looked like she was the hero of the day, though she didn’t feel very much like one.
Luvi walked towards her house, her mind completely forgetting about the pain she’d felt earlier. She actually felt completely fine, which was convenient because she felt like something was off. It only took a few seconds to figure out what it was – the road was completely empty, save for a lone figure that stood menacingly several dozen yards away.
The man held a sword and was walking towards her menacingly. Luvi heard a voice booming in her head. "I’ll show you my special technique. It’s the kind of thing to only last resort...”
Luvi felt herself fill with fear. She got flashbacks to her days training with a sword and what was worse, she didn’t even have a weapon. Her legs wouldn’t move either, no matter how much she wanted to run. The menacing foe stopped just a few paces away and then fell into a stance, his broad shoulders relaxed, his body radiating danger.
The man gave Luvi the impression of flowing water, but the intense man's appearance made him think of a boulder. Luvi didn't know why he was able to notice this at this moment, but he ignored it as she braced herself for his attack. The attacker moved with a speed that seemed unnatural for a man of his size, but it was so fast that it blurred. Luvi would normally have tried to block the attack, but something inside of her told her to retaliate in kind. She clenched her fist and drove her hips upward, building up enough momentum to deliver a blow with increased power and speed.
Her body was pulsating with so much energy and her heart was pounding so loudly in her ears that she was barely aware of her body's shortcomings, her weary muscles groaned at the effort. The two blows came down with such incredible speed that Luvi wondered whether they had been illusions.
Luvi felt her arm flare up in a burning pain that tore through her right arm and stopped right there at the shoulder as she staggered past the assailant. She half turned to see the man clenching his stomach and quivering on one knee, a stream of blood dripping from his mouth, and smiling at her, saying, "Not bad at all, but I think I got you worse." Luvi looked down to see that she’d been slashed across the stomach, then her vision started to fade.
(Awake now)
Luvi sat up with a start, clutching at her stomach. “Oh, it was just a dream.”
