...But he also has bites taken out of him. His environmental shield is burning and bubbling.

FUCK, he was an idiot.

Self-healing with red light isn't categorically impossible. Which is good, because SOP if you know you're going to be sustaining yourself with Butcher's Blood is to call in a Blue Lantern to be on call for the minute your fight finishes so they can heal you before your rage fades too much to keep you going. And he can't contact anyone from her as far as he knows.

He's going to have to stop experimenting for the moment. Fortunately, self-hatred works fine.

"Right, uh, not entirely a failure, Panj, but I fucked that up. Edges of the point expanded when they ran out of wood and I was closer than stellar dust. I'll explain later, fixing myself up is going to take a few hours."

Hopefully. It'll serve him fucking right and his girlfriend local coordinator will never stop giving him shit for it.

He's descending back toward the planet as it is, he doesn't want to reserve any power for the environmental shield right now.

"Shit, that wasn't even a big spell!"

"I shaved pretty much the entire piece of wood away, to check that I could. That was my main test, and it's possibly pretty helpful for getting all the other points dug out of the planet and thrown away where they can't hurt you all anymore. But it turns out that it just extends to the nearest matter nearby if it doesn't have anything in physical contact. Probably they're sucking air in at a slow rate and always have been."

"I should have fucking predicted this. And, come to think of it, that it might eat you, which I guess it didn't, but fuck, I'm sorry, man, should have warned you."

"Anyway I'm landing in the wilderness now and will take a while to patch myself up as much as I can. I'll find you when I'm done."

"O-okay. Uh. Thank you."

He has landed. This will, as he said, fucking take a while.

He is angry at himself. He is angry at the world - and this magic which manages to be even more hostile than the one he's spent his life mastering.

He was doing his best to save a world and he doesn't fucking deserve to have these gaping rents in his flesh.

And he will, very slowly, demand that the flesh grow back.

It hurts like a bitch. So does the Butcher's Blood filling all the other space.

But

he

can

fucking

fix

it!

The wounds were fairly superficial, not far below the skin anywhere and less than a square foot of area. It still takes him four grueling hours and leaves him exhausted and a little light-headed - probably lost some actual blood while the Blood was sustaining him.

His suit patched itself up pretty much instantly when the wounds were closed. When he gets back to Gatesnest he'll look good as new, except for looking dead tired.

He'll find the destruction team again. "Hey. That could have gone worse. Any thoughts you had while I was out of contact?"

"Uh, I talked to some people and they think that if you take the disappearance points out of the planet it will all collapse to fill the resulting space and we will all die of earthquakes."

"Hmm. I'm replacing nothing with nothing - but they do behave weirdly, so that makes some sense. ...I'd have to bring a lot of rock down to fill it in, and couldn't do it all at once. But that's doable. Every solar system has a lot of asteroids, and this one's no exception. Bring a plug for each hole."

"He thinks that will still probably do some earthquaking but it might well be better than not doing it."

"Yeah, it's maybe not a whole solution. And as I discovered, it wouldn't be entirely safe to keep using the points I threw away - they'd just keep reaching outward, and no one except maybe a Lantern would be able to see if they were reaching back toward the planet, and people might use them too heavily since the cost was invisible. But it's a tool we have, now."

"I didn't end up having the chance to put my full power behind trying to destroy it. I'm not going to try today, healing wiped me out. Also I'm a little more pessimistic it's possible than I was."

"Yeah. They're... they're like that. Is there somewhere else you could put them - not the moon, if you can get farther than that, but -"

"Other planets in the system, yeah. The biggest ones aren't really made of rock - it's atmosphere pretty much all the way in - but as we learned today that doesn't matter. The sun's even bigger, but that would be bloody fucking stupid so we won't do anything remotely like that."

"- yeah."

"If you don't have any other urgent questions or suggestions, I should check with the Moon team, I disappeared on them."

"They packed up some things but they're less enthusiastic about the plan to spend a while failing to think of anything on the moon instead of here. I think Ranary left to see if Cor wanted any help."

"It would probably be a bit dull, and you're probably not going to enjoy the gravity much, considering. Well, less urgency, then. I did want to ask what Cor was working on, earlier... where are they?"

"His house, probably. Up in the hills. I've never been myself or I'd show you there."

"I'll wait until he gets back, then. But speaking of a house... I should find somewhere to sleep tonight. I'm going to do some more, make a pocket in the moon, but I will need to crash in a few hours."

"You can sleep over at my place. My - there's an empty room."

"Right. Thank you. Maybe best you show me there now, and I'll go - do errands - after?"

"Yeah." He leads him through a couple of gates - here it's summer and there it's winter, then here it's pouring rain, here it's summer again but a cool one by a lake. House. Spare room.

He cracks a window open, looks out it up at the sky and musters a little annoyance to get the ring to record it well enough he'll be able to find it from space.

"Thanks. I think I'll go tear a piece out of the moon now. This, at least, is too simple to go wrong."

"What's the moon pocket for now that they don't think it's a high leverage idea?"

"They might change their mind, and setting it up for them is easy. Also, my ring is - fundamentally mostly good at destruction, and so it'll be kind of relaxing to do it."

"Oh, I was thinking maybe you could do it in a way that leaves the same amount of moon..."