Kirin tucked his elbow close against his ribs, stretching carefully to ensure he can move and breathe without piercing his own lungs, and decided that they were possibly bruised or cracked, but not displaced enough to cause him danger, unless he took another blow there. That in mind, he stalked through the chaos of the abruptly-made battlefield, pausing only when he saw another one of the bandits threatening a wounded survivor of the initial explosion.

He's not close enough, not fast enough, for all his speed and training. Luckily, he doesn't have to be.

The blade left his hand in a curved arc, end over end before slamming point-first into the bandit's back. The man screamed, dropping his own weapon and stumbling forward, and by then Kirin was close enough to strike. He buried his second weapon in the man's spine, below the first one, and ripped it out sideways in a horrible display. The man fell, and Kirin took his other dagger from where it was lodged and cut the man's throat, putting him out of his misery.

He headed for the center of the clearing, where he could see Elthas facing off against a garishly dressed man holding himself with a confidence and skill foreign to the rest of the invaders--the leader, no doubt. Kirin wanted to go help, but Elthas spared a second of his own fight to charge Kirin with the safety of the survivors, and that's not a responsibility he would take lightly. With a frustrated grimace, he turned away, back towards the last few scuffles--a warrior with pink hair had dispatched at least two of her opponents and was facing a third, and a furious-looking redhead faced off with a soldier. Everywhere else, men and elves and orcs lay dead or wounded. Leaving the others to their fight, Kirin began to comb the battlefield, killing the enemy injured and searching among the refugees for those who could be saved.

It was grim work. The residents and the refugees alike had been wounded and exhausted already, before this attack, and even the untrained bandits had wreaked mayhem among them. Kirin straightened, closing the eyes of a boy no older than twelve, and then helped an elderly man with a gash in his leg hobble back towards the Tree. He paused for breath once his burden was handed over to the capable healers, only to freeze as he realized that the bandit leader and Elthas were inches away from each other, a blade leveled at the leader's neck.