Grabbing Janice by the hand, Peter poked his head out from behind the huge dragon corpse all three of them were crouching behind, and tried to figure out the best route back to Yoyo's position. It was then that he spotted him, smack bang right in the middle of everything. HOOK! Before he could even think, 'what the hell are you doing?', he realised not what, but just who the rugby playing human was dragging. FLASH! Instantly he grasped Richie by the upper arm, trying to make himself heard over the racket of rampaging magic and very real explosions. Try as he might, he just couldn't. So instead, he pointed, hoping his new found leader would get the message. She did.
Screaming at the top of her voice for her two friends to follow, the lacrosse playing wizard broke into a sprint, tumbling here and there occasionally to avoid the odd long range attack. Following in her wake, the two reunited lovers had a hard time skipping up and over some of the debris, consequently arriving at Hook a few moments after their leader who was, by then, crouched over Flash's unconscious form.
Looking up into Hook's newly repaired face, whilst at the same time deflecting away numerous bright yellow magical spears that would really have ruined their day, and their lives, Richie asked what they were all thinking.
"Where's Yoyo? Why hasn't he healed Flash yet?"
Before Peter had a chance to respond, Hook cut in.
"Yoyo's in a bad shape. I think he tried to heal Flash, but somehow it's all gone wrong. He told me to get Flash's body to him so that he could touch the chains straddling his torso."
Placing her dagger beside one of Flash's chains, it immediately became obvious what the metal they were made of was. Laminium!
'Impressive,' thought Richie. Where or even how the ex-Crimson Guard had gotten such power she couldn't even begin to fathom. Her abilities had been greatly enhanced by the laminium in the dagger, and that must have been only a fraction of what made up the chains. The magical potential alone was staggering. And so if that was the case, why on earth couldn't Flash heal himself? Then she spotted it... the dire infested wound on his leg, leaching a dark, stinking matter, its covering increasing with every second that passed.
'No doubt naga magic,' she thought.
"Peter... you and Hook take an arm each. I'll take his good leg. Let's get him over to Yoyo in double quick time."
Both nodding, and with Janice accompanying them, using Fu-ts'ang to guard their path, Peter, Hook and Richie carried their injured friend back to Yoyo. Of everything that had happened in the middle of the raging fight, and that includes Janice sitting on the floor, eyes closed, all alone for quite a while, this was almost the most bizarre. But in no small part due to a considerable amount of luck, they made it back, placing their friend at the feet of the statue-like healer. Puffing and panting, having exerted considerable strain, Hook told them again that Yoyo needed to touch the chains. No sooner had the words left his mouth when Richie, enhanced by the dagger, picked up the injured Flash, careful not to touch his toxic wound, and slowly walked him across to the healer. With Flash in place, Peter gently lowered Yoyo's right hand, and despite him being in a trance-like state, he found very little in the way of resistance. The instant his dragon hand made contact with the magical metal, Yoyo let out a long sigh, accompanied by the words,
"Oh my."
Taking a step back, Peter asked Richie if she needed a hand with Flash. Smiling, she declined. With Janice still using Fu-ts'ang to great effect and Hook watching out for any kind of sneak attack, Peter found himself encouraging Yoyo's contingent of misfits to head his way faster. Marvelling at their mastery of so much dragon magic, particularly given their apparent age, he couldn't help but notice just how lucky they were getting. Opponents' feet would give way at just the right time, while swords either slipped away or were mysteriously blocked for no apparent reason. Absolutely convinced something else was going on, he really couldn't fathom what.
Yoyo felt fulfilled... spiritually, magically, in every possible way. That's how this abundance of magic impacted on him. Clearing his mind from the fog that had clouded it, and glad he didn't now have to face the consequences of embarking on a mantra and not having enough magical energy to complete it, he turned his attention, not for the first time, to the dragon before him. Before even delving into the depths of Flash's injury, something tickled his senses, brushed his brain. But before he could latch onto it, it was gone, scooting off into the ether. A feeling of change somehow played over him. Was he supposed to change? Had the battle somehow changed? He didn't know and right at this very moment, didn't actually care. Dismissing the strange sensation as just one of those things, the dragon healer once again cast a mantra, this time not even vaguely concerned about the amount of mana needed to see it through. Pure, raw, unadulterated magic seeped out of Yoyo and flooded Flash's damaged body. But a connection remained... one tiny strand of the supernatural held the link together. Through that bond, information filtered back and forth. As the power invaded Flash at a cellular level, an unrivalled level of detail found its way back to the dragon healer. Over the course of twenty seconds or so, Yoyo built up an unparalleled picture of Flash's physiology. In this case, magic trumps science every time. Studying the information for but a few seconds at most, it became clear just how invasive the enchantment he'd been struck with was. It was multiplying and spreading at quite a rate. Normally Yoyo would have been encumbered by the amount of mana available to him, but for the very first time in his life, this wasn't the case. And so with that in mind, he let his imagination run rife, dreaming up the most outrageous and majestic solutions to the almost unimaginable problem. In two blinks of an eye, he had it. Desperate didn't begin to cover it, and under normal circumstances he wouldn't have even dared dream of it. But normal had caught the bus out of here long ago. Only drastic measures remained.
Breaking his concentration, he returned to reality, Richie, Peter, Janice and Hook all pleased to see him.
"Thank goodness you're okay," exclaimed Peter, clutching Yoyo's free hand.
"Yes, yes, yes. I'm sorry, but we don't have time for all this at the moment."
With Peter wondering what he'd done wrong, the healer's eyes fell on Richie and more importantly the dagger she held.
"Ah... you must be Miss Rump. It's a pleasure to finally meet you. I've heard all about you."
'That could mean anything,' Richie thought, but went along with it anyway.
"I'm afraid I'm going to need you to do something that you really don't want to," insisted Yoyo.
"And what's that?"
"You must cut Flash's leg off somewhere above his injury. Make sure you're not too close to the magical infection itself and use your weapon's magic to cauterise the wound or all this will be for nothing."