//------------------------------//
// Chapter 19: Battle between gods part 2 
// Story: human of the everfree 
// by Aljazig 
//------------------------------//

While I was desperately thinking of a way to turn this situation in my favor, a fierce battle raged in the sky above me, as beams of magic were shot left and right from the dryads hands and earth splitting blows were delivered by the alicorns' weapons.

Then, only minutes after the start of the battle, something changed. The dryad had started dodging the alicorns' attacks and her beams were much thinner. Those were fairly obvious, but another indicator of what was going on were the plants around me, that were slowly wilting, the longer the fight went on. The dryad was obviously running out of magic and was taking it from the plants of her forest.

It wasn't long after that, that the dryad got hit by the white alicorns axe. The hit sent her flying for a few dozen meters, before she forcefully stopped herself. For a second time stopped as I gazed at her expression of fury, before she disappeared and reappeared next to the white alicorn, delivering a vicious dropkick to it's head. The alicorn was shot towards the ground at the speed that would surely kill me three times over, but with only a single flap of it's wings it not only stopped, seemingly completely unfazed, but also propelled itself upwards towards the dryad at an even higher velocity.

The dryad for her part didn't get a chance to be surprised at the impossible feat the white alicorn achieved, as she was locked in a hand to hand with the blue alicorn, who, in an astonishing display of hand to hand combat and magic, was steadily landing hits on the vital areas of a humanoid body, that the dryad possessed.

Her concentration on the fight proved to be a mistake, as the white alicorn teleported into her blind spot and, if not for her astounding reflexes, would have beheaded her. Instead she lost an arm.

If it wasn't obvious before, that the dryad would lose, it certainly was now. Apparently she realized that too, as she started descending while trying to keep both alicorns at bay. Even to my amateurish eyes it was obvious she was trying to get closer to her source of power, the plants and animals of the forest. The alicorns knew it to, as their attack became faster and more unpredictable, until the dryad made a mistake.

Using her downwards momentum, she dodged a spinning kick from the blue alicorn, then blocked another beam of magic from her left with a compact magic shield while at the same time blocking the white alicorns axe with her remaining arm coated in magic. Then, suddenly the white alicorn disappeared. It's horn wasn't glowing to indicate a teleportation spell and there was also no shower of sparks. The only thing left of the alicorn was it's giant one handed axe.

As an outside observer I of course noted that the blue alicorns horn was glowing, and my suspicions of an illusion were confirmed, as the white alicorn popped out from thin air behind the dryad and sent her flying with a punch it put it's full body into.

The dryad flew parallel to the ground, in my general direction, her body twisting and turning in the air, until I could just barely see her in the upper peripherals of my vision from the angle I was looking at. At that point the blue alicorn appeared above her and sent her shooting at the ground with a perfectly timed and vicious axe kick.

At that point a stunning realization came to me. The dryad was shooting towards the ground at speeds that would make rockets jealous and I was fairly certain that she was more or less above me when the axe kick was delivered. In conclusion, the next few moments would hurt. A lot.

Not even a moment after the dryad hit the ground about a meter in front of me, did the shock wave hit me, sending me flying.





'All I see is darkness. Is this death? It feels so peaceful I could jus-' At that moment the nerves in my body decided to inform me, that I am in fact not dead. My distinctly not girlish scream of surprised anguish echoed around the forest as my eyes shot open to a starry night sky.

'Ugh, my everything hurts. I was probably unconscious for only a few hours, otherwise some kind of deadly animal would already have come and started eating me.'

For some reason lady luck decided to come back into my life as my head was propped up on a fallen tree trunk and my neck was not broken because of it.

Careful observation of my surroundings, or at least as much of my surroundings as I could see without moving anything except my eyes, didn't reveal any kind of animal footprints or any other signs that a predator was lurking in the bushes, so I focused on the bigger fish in the pond.

'How the hell am I going to survive in this forest with my body broken to pieces like a fucking puzzle? Maybe if I just stay quiet I can survive the night and then drink the morning dew to prevent myself from dehydrating?' Apparently fate decided to help me answer that question as a deer with crystal antlers jumped over the bushes.

'If I remember correctly that is a crystal deer. It's one of the more dangerous animals in this forest as it appears to be docile until you come close enough. At that point it will bite you and the poison on it's teeth will crystalize most of the blood in your body in a matter of minutes. If you somehow survive to that point it will crush your head with it's hooves and then feast on your body as it is in fact a carnivorous animal.' While that information shot through my head the deer came ever closer.

It's front hooves were only centimeters away from my legs. It calmly lowered it's head as if to nuzzle my right leg, but I knew better, not that I could do anything about it. It's head was millimeters away, when something shot from the underbrush to my left and crashed into the crystal deer, sending both, the crystal deer and the unknown attacker flying into the bushes, that the deer jumped over to get to me.

The sounds of fighting only lasted for a few seconds before a loud sound, similar to the sound of a thick branch breaking, echoed through the forest. Seconds later the black panther, that lead me to the dryad, came out of the bushes, the deer with a clearly broken neck being dragged behind it.

The panther set the dead deer next to my stiff and pain riddled body and looked at me, like it was waiting for me to say something.

"Uh, hey there. You wouldn't happen to know of a way to heal me, would you?" I wasn't really sure why I was asking an animal for help, but something in the panthers eyes told me, it was far more intelligent than it let on. So when I asked, I was both happy and weirded out when the panther nodded and shot out of my view.

Since I had nothing else to do I once again checked the condition of my body. Apparently it's funny playing with mortals for lady luck as I found I was both lucky and unlucky. The lucky part was, that my shoulder that was previously dislocated, popped back into place when I was blown away for the second time. The unlucky part was, that one of my legs was most definitely broken, the broken rib was joined by a few others, but I was pretty certain it actually put a hole into my lungs as I had been coughing up blood since I woke up.

Soon after I finished my self analysis the panther came back and put two green gemstones that were about as big as pills. I really had no idea what to do with them, so I decided to ask the panther: "So, should I like, eat these, or something?"

The panther made a motion that resembled how a human laughs surprisingly well, before it shook it's head and nudged the two gemstones closer to my good hand. I decided it wouldn't harm me to touch them, so I took one with my good hand. It was smooth and the light from the stars fractured beautifully in it's green hued interior.

'It's like it was enchanted. Wait. Of course! Magic!' Immediately after my late realization I put down the gemstone and tried to use a standard healing spell that Zero thought me, but the moment the magic started flowing through my hand it started stinging and the longer it went on the more it hurt. A few seconds in the skin on my hand started peeling off like it was burned. Safe to say I only kept the spell going for about 5 seconds, before I quickly decided that I was doing more damage than I was healing.

'If only using magic didn't damage my body. Hmm, a magical foci ...' As I looked around me for anything that cold transfer magic instead of my body, my eyes fell to the gemstones still siting in the grass.

'Zero told me about enchantments. If I remember correctly, he said that to enchant something you must make a spell matrix and then instead of using magic to cast it you must focus it into an object. If you do it correctly the object will then use the magic source you specified to cast the spell. Whelp, why not try it, after all it can hardly get wo-. No. Stop. Do not think that. Just try enchanting.'

And so after I got my thoughts under control I again picked up one of the gemstones with my good hand and focused on a simple healing matrix, with the specified source being the magic of the thing holding it. When I had a clear image of the matrix, I imagined inserting it into the gemstone, like you would a book into a box. Throughout the whole process I had my eyes closed in concentration. After I finished I felt a bit lighter and some of the previous pain was gone, so I opened my eyes and looked at the gemstone that was shining with a dull green light.