Mal clashed with the wolf in front of him. Now that it was one on one, he felt confident. He was technically injured more than the wolf, who was now using only five legs, but he was shaper and the wolf was not. Now that he had made a seal from wind, his imagination ran wild. He thought it sounded too good to be true, but now he let his creativity run loose.
As they clashed, Mal whispered a long incantation. The wolf managed to interrupt it the first time, for which it had to pay with another deep cut from his umbrella, but he finished it the second time. The wolf jumped, but Mal slid under him and buried his umbrella deep into its body. Then, a ray of electric shocks burst from the umbrella and the wolf became paralyzed. Mal quickly got to his feet, in a second quickly cast sharpening on his umbrella, and with one fell swoop cut its head off.
The moment the other wolf managed to tear down the wind sphere around him, he was hit by another electric ray, this time from the distance of three meters. This one wasn't so powerful—after all, air is a natural insulator—but it still managed to disorient the wolf for some time. That time was enough for Mal to bury the umbrella into the skull of the creature, killing it.
The third followed very quickly. Mal wasn't even forced to use the electric incantation again; the wolf was still in pain and so he finished him with the same method. His battle was over.
One wolf lay dead on the ground. Its second friend was still alive, running around Leo. He found out he couldn't stand on his leg, so he was forced to sit there on the ground while the wolf circled around him. When it stopped to attack, its skull was quickly penetrated by a precisely measured bullet. Its lifeless body fell to the ground.
After some time looking around making sure there were no more wolves, he allowed himself to cast the simple healing incantation Mal taught him. It couldn't heal the injuries, but it stopped the bleeding and helped him through the worst of the pain.
"Let the flesh heal, wound close, blood flow once again. Sanguine commands: heal."
Mal watched as his worst injuries became undone. He gazed to where Leo was and saw him sitting on the ground between two dead wolves. His fight was, as it looked from here, more gruesome than Mal's, but he was alive.
'Medea's medical care would be needed for both of us. It's pretty clear its ability is to just heal better; she just isn't aware of that.'
He spent a minute getting three terror cores out of the wolves he killed and then went to help Leo. That was a much more complicated issue than he imagined. Leo's bone in his leg was truly shattered, so he left him to develop an incantation to put it at least a little bit together. He fished two terror cores out of the bodies and also took a bone from the leg of the animal. He then fixed it around Leo's broken leg, and when they both focused their incantations on that, he was able to slowly, albeit painfully, walk.
The journey to their camp was long and boring. They had to walk slowly and keep themselves in the shadows of the buildings. Both had enough fighting for one day.
When Medea and Alex saw them, they were gasping for air.
"What in the world happened to you???" Medea asked while she was giving Leo's leg what it needed. The first aid she had was truly magical, but even so, Leo's leg and Mal's shoulder would need a week to be back in a state where they would be able to fight. So for now, they simply had to be calm and rest.
Mal was sitting on the roof of the building. They had returned yesterday and their pain was now down to a very manageable level. They both lived through an awakening of sorts. Leo found out he had to use shaping to fight, and Mal found out just how creative he can be with it.
He had been experimenting for the last three hours. He was still a beginner and there was no one to teach him, so he had to discover things himself. He found out that the main factor for shaping is truly his will. When he put all his emotions and his mind into the fire spell, it was much more destructive than when he was trying to be nonchalant. The second factor he found was about the incantations themselves. They were subjective. The correct goal wasn't to describe a precise objective definition of a concept, but a subjective experience with it.
With all of this together, Mal came to a very quick breakthrough. It was all about the will. The will alone shaped the world; the incantations and names were simply tools for one to better channel their will into the world. He had to create more useful incantations to use for future fights.
He didn't see Medea because of his thoughts, and when she greeted him, it scared him a little.
"Oh hi Medea, sorry, I was in my head again."
She was looking at the floor for a while and then blurted out:
"I want to fight."
"You want to what now?" Mal couldn't help but be surprised. He had seen her holding the umbrella-sword once and it was entirely wrong.
"You made it back in such horrible shape and I just... I just want to help. If there are three people, it would be better than two. I don't want to be completely useless."
"First of all, you are not. You took care of me and Leo, and without you, we would need a much longer recovery. And second... sorry, you aren't ready to fight."
Medea looked sadly at the ground.
"But I can teach you how to fight. Assimilate with the first terror core, learn how to fight with a sword, and then you can start going with us. We have a week now that we must recover, so I will spend it teaching you."