Spitting out broken glass and the small stopper, he pushed his aura senses to the limit as he looked around. There had been thirteen people on the plane, including himself, but he was only sensing four other auras. He had awakened immediately, so they should all be within his sensory range. The ones he couldn’t sense were most likely dead.
He couldn’t sense any normal-rank auras. The pilots and the flight attendants had probably died in the initial explosion. There had been six bronze-rankers, including himself, Keith, and the four-man security team. Ironically, all but one of the other bronze-rankers seemed to have died, while all the iron-rankers survived.
Jason guessed that the source of the explosion was close to where the security team had been sitting on the plane. The other bronze-rankers, himself and Keith, were with the iron-rankers in different section of the plane.
Jason looked closer at the auras. At fifteen kilometres up, the air was freezing, and it would have been hard to breathe, if that was something he needed to do. The iron-rankers who did would have a harder time of it.
He sensed the only other bronze-rank aura close by. It was one of the security people, against Jason’s expectation, which probably meant that Keith was amongst the dead. That man was in a similar position to Jason, having survived the blast due to his powers and luck. The atmosphere didn’t appear to bother him, and he was now using a slow fall power.
The three iron-rankers had fared much worse. He could tell from their auras that they were all injured and unconscious, plunging uncontrolled through the air. At least their incredible altitude gave Jason time to act.
“Your cloak’s slow fall drains your mana exponentially as you include more people,” Shade reminded Jason, who was angling his glide descent in the direction of the closest iron-rank aura. Jason had tested the parameters of his weight-reduction power extensively in the course of his ongoing training to explore the limits of his abilities.
The wind roaring past his ears should have made Shade’s words unrecognizable, but Jason heard him clearly. His bronze-rank spirit attribute enhanced his perception enough that he could pick up the sounds before the high-altitude winds and their rapid descent carried them away. Not only that, it could filter out the extraneous noise, allowing Jason to ignore that and focus on what he wanted to hear.
This was not something anyone could do and was a result of sensory techniques that Farrah had taught him during his initial training. They had not had any real effect at the time, but his trust in her led him to diligently practise until he reached bronze rank. The results spoke for themselves.
Since he had learned she was alive, Jason had found himself constantly reminded of everything she had done for him. Much of it was groundwork he never understood the value of until months after her death. Even as he was falling from an exploded plane, he couldn’t help but think of what he owed her. He was going to make sure that no one stole his chance to show his gratitude, regardless of what they put in his path.
“You have a suggestion?” Jason asked.
“I can help them arrest their fall,” Shade said. “I cannot fly as fast as they are falling, however. You will need to get my bodies to them.”
“On it.”
One of the advantages of Jason’s cloak obtaining a gliding power was an instinctive grasp of how to navigate a fall through the sky. Otherwise, he’d have been reduced to skydiving technique he’d picked up from watching action movies.
He angled himself to plunge down, employing his cloak just enough to impart the control he needed, along with deflecting tumbling debris. Compared to the insensible flailing of the unconscious iron-rankers, he was able to easily outpace them.
His first target was the most injured—Anna’s assistant, Ketevan. All of the iron-rankers were in a very bad way, but he could sense her aura dim as her life teetered on the edge. She had a chunk of fuselage stuck in her gut, like Jason had suffered, but worse. She also lacked his rank and other advantages. Her wound was far more dangerous than his.
He was careful in his approach, so as not to slam into her, getting a tap in the unmentionables from a wind-thrashed arm for his trouble. Pulling her close, he shoved a bronze-rank potion into her mouth and clamped it closed with his hand, smashing the vial as he’d done in his own mouth. The glass might cut her, but it was damage that would soak up very little of the potion’s healing strength.
He kept his hand in place over her mouth until he sensed the magic start to reinvigorate her waning life force. One of Shade’s bodies crawled from Jason onto Ketevan, taking the form of a black parachute pack.
“Nice,” Jason said. “Can you control the parachute while they’re unconscious?”
“Of course.”
“Wait until she recovers some more before pulling the chute,” Jason said. He himself waited a little longer for the healing potion to do some repairs before reefing the chunk of debris from her abdomen. She woke with a scream, eyes confused as she gasped in the thin, rushing air.
“Go for it, Shade,” he said.
A black parachute opened, yanking her away from Jason, who continued to plummet downwards. He spotted Keith, who had suffered a similar slash to the neck as Jason but didn’t enjoy Jason’s advantages. He was a third of the way to decapitated, his clearly dead body trailing blood as it fell.
Aram and Asya received the same potion-parachute combo as Ketevan, except that Jason gave them iron-rank potions instead of over-ranked ones. Their injuries were not as life threatening, so a bronze-rank potion that would prevent them from using more potions for a good while was a poor choice. The stronger potion had helped pull Ketevan out of immediate danger, but until her body processed the residual magic, potions would be unable to heal her further.
Jason fed potions to each of the three iron-rankers and equipped them all with Shade parachutes. By the time he was done, they had not yet descended to the cloud layer. Shade controlled the parachutes to keep the iron-rankers close, while the bronze-ranker used his slow fall power to match their descent speed. He had strong lateral control that reminded Jason of Sophie’s gliding power; he suspected the man to have a wind essence.
While the three iron-rankers recovered their senses, Jason sent the bronze-ranker a party invitation so they could communicate over the rushing wind. He didn’t bother with the others because, even though they had regained consciousness, they were too disoriented to accept the invitation. The bronze-ranker had participated in the incursion event with Jason, so he wasn’t surprised by it.
[Bruce Corwin] has been added your party.
“That was a conventional explosive or we would have sensed it,” Bruce said through voice chat. “If I was hitting someone without using magic, I’d have a follow-up team with magic aplenty to make sure the job was done.”
“Sounds reasonable,” Jason agreed. He was far from his field of experience and was willing to defer to the trained expert, even if they had missed the bomb.