While I got as much out of him as I felt comfortable, Miki went on and started resurrecting more and more people. As more people sprung back to life, the once dead landscape began to fill with the sounds of life. Most of those sounds were mourning, though. Women and men would let out wailful moans and cries as they looked over their destroyed city. Even if they were all brought back to life, they could still vaguely recall their last moments of life surrounded by fear and pain. If that wasn’t enough to cause them to break down, the sight of an entire life they had built turned to ashes would.

It seemed like they mostly had the same opinion as the first guy. The bandits usually didn’t attack their village. They had a small patrol that protected it, but for a direct attack that wiped it out, this was the first. They were as far out as the other village, but they were still on the border of what could be called the current Bandit Country, so they had likely been ignored until resources were needed. Then, they were wiped out in a single night.

That meant I needed to move faster, as many of the towns inward might have been ransacked earlier. There might be people who had already died a month or longer ago, and if I didn’t get to them soon, they would truly become lost souls. We continued on, both working in tandem.

It got to the point where who we could resurrect was no longer an option, as crying women would shove the corpse of their children on us to resurrect as soon as possible. I had originally planned to have us both resurrect as many as we could so that we would go as fast as possible, but I realized that there was no way we could keep going without breaks.

Those breaks meant time in which a husband held the body of his deceased wife and a mother looked over the crispy body of her burnt child. We found the best way was to take turns, so one of us was resting while the other resurrected. That way, someone was always going and we didn’t just sit there while facing the longing and desperate stare of the villagers. What started out as a simple means to an end ended up as a mentally exhausting activity that left me feeling just as emotionally drained as magically exhausted.

Even downing waters of life and taking turns, we still plowed through our mana quickly. Resurrection was no joke of a spell. It ate up a lot of mana, and even people with multiple jobs and hero levels of mana couldn’t keep up for long. My dreams of doing two or three towns a day was clearly a pipedream. The night was already coming by the time we resurrected the last few.

I felt rather lucky at who I had with me during this. Lydia, Celeste, and Terra weren’t the right girls for this kind of scene. Their hearts would assuredly break. Shao, Carmine, Salicia, and even Raissa were made of harder stuff. The only reason Miki held on was because she was too busy resurrecting people, but she had tears in her eyes too. I hoped she wouldn’t have to see this kind of ugliness either, but a strong mind was important for a Spiritualist and Psionic.

We had found bodies for the vast majority of people, only having to recreate the bodies of four of the citizens. That was when we faced the next challenge. Everyone who was now alive in the village was not everyone. There were still more people missing. One man grabbed my shirt, begging me to resurrect his wife who wasn’t there. However, after using the item he gave me, nearly passing out in the process, the Resurrection failed.

“I’m sorry… I’m just tired.” I apologized, not meaning to yawn and come off as inconsiderate. “Miki…”

Miki’s eyes jerked open. “M-master…”

She was nearly asleep on her feet. I shook my head. I’d make it work. Just as I stepped forward to do it, Shao put her hand on my shoulder.

“Master, it’s not that. You cast the spell correctly. The problem is… that woman is alive!”