The Exorcist Doctor

Chapter 127 - Quiet Cure // Loud Becoming

That same night was a heavy one. The eternal shroud of coal dust and burnt oil was thicker over Ironwych’s sky, making the city a chore to trudge through, but it could’ve been worse. The two of them could’ve been sleep-deprived and lacking in upgraded mutations.

Instead, the two of them managed to make their way over to their destination without any hijinks. Now Gael crouched on the slanted corner roof of an abandoned workshop, while Maeve, balanced beside him, looked behind and around to make sure there weren’t any guards posted around here. None so far. They were probably safe here.

About fifty meters below them, tucked into a back-corner tangle of crooked alleys and half-collapsed smokestacks, sat the abandoned factory Arnell had marked on their map. But calling it ‘abandoned’ was generous. The machines inside were silent, sure, but the windows glowed with sickly yellow light—bright enough to show movement, silhouettes, and the unmistakable shuffle of bodies inside the vast and dilapidated building.

Maeve squinted down. “That’s… definitely not abandoned.”

“False advertising,” Gael murmured. “Someone should sue.”

Even from where they perched, Gael could count at least three dozen Steelborn guards patrolling the gates and fences outside. Maybe more. They were all big bastards in beetle-forged armor, the metal plates shaped like carapaces, and he didn’t even have to check—there was no doubt most of them had Advanced Beetle Classes.

That was a lot more gangsters with systems than even the Repossessors had, though he supposed that only made sense. At the end of the day, the Repossessors were a relatively new gang compared to the decades-long history the Steelborn had. They were amateurs compared to these guys.

“I’d rather not have to fight them,” he muttered.

“Same.” Maeve glanced over at him. “So? What’s the plan?”

He reached into his coat and pulled free a grappling gun. “Observe, dearest wife—”

Maeve slapped the gun right out of his hand, and he watched as it clattered down the clotheslines beneath him with sad metallic clacks. “We are not doing the grappling gun again. Put that thing away. Where are you even getting them from?”

“But it kinda works.”

“It has never worked.”

“... Oh, yeah. It has never worked.”

She folded her arms, waiting. “What’s the real plan?”

He sighed, twirling his cane once as he surveyed the building again. The windows were all reinforced. The doors were triple-locked with steel braces. The guards were arranged in overlapping patrol loops. Definitely not a place anyone was meant to escape from—or break into the hard way.

“Our objective is to bust out the Myrmur Hosts,” he said, tapping his chin lightly, “and then destroy every Myrmur heart inside their bodies so they’re of no value to the Steelborn and no danger to anyone else. Preferably, we also destroy the hearts while we’re inside the factory, because I’d rather not risk any one of them manifesting their Myrmurs while we’re evacuating them to Arnell’s place. If it’s been a while since they took stabilizers, who knows how much damage they could do to the city if they freak out and run off.”

“Uh-huh.”

“But assuming there’s at least one Blight-Class Myrmur Host inside—and an artificially created one at that—that means there’ll also be a bomb inside them, which will detonate when the Myrmur heart is destroyed. However, we also have no way of telling who has a Blight-Class Myrmur if they’re artificially implanted, just like we couldn’t tell Lorcawn had a Blight-Class Myrmur inside him until it manifested externally… which it can’t do here because the stabilizer will prevent it from manifesting.”

“So we can’t just storm in and bust the Hosts out because we don’t want to make a fuss with the Steelborn.”

“Nope.”

“And even if we can get inside and free the Myrmur Hosts, we’ll have to destroy all of their Myrmur hearts while we’re still inside without getting detected by the Steelborn, but if we do that, we risk accidentally destroying a Blight-Class Myrmur heart and end up killing the Host in the process.”

“Yep.”

“And if we do that, we’re back to square one with our lead on artificially implanted Myrmurs. We won’t be able to question the Host about where they got their Myrmur from, or who they got their Myrmur from.”

“Yep.”

“So what, exactly, do we do here?”

Gael pointed his cane at the front gate.

“Well, the way I see it, we still have the oldest trick in the book.”

Thirty minutes later, they strolled right through the guarded front gate with two food carts. The two Steelborn sentries barely glanced at the stamped seal Gael tried to wave at them before barking at them to hurry up with ‘the ratons’, but in fairness, it helped that the Steelborn were the strongest gang in Ironwych. They simply weren’t expecting someone to knock out the original ration carriers, strip them down to their underclothes, and disguise themselves as one of them.

Now Gael and Maeve pushed the food carts through the factory’s dark intestines, removing their Steelborn masks and stripping their guard clothes off.

“It’s too easy,” Maeve muttered. “We just walked right in.”

“Hey, it’s not the oldest trick in the book for nothing.”

They pushed their carts along the giant building’s guts, which were a mess of dead conveyor belts, idle stamping presses, and suspended walkways that hung like vines overhead. A few overhead lamps flickered with a faint, jaundiced glow, casting everything in the color of spoiled fat, but otherwise it was dark and quiet here. Too many heavy iron doors presented themselves as they walked. Too many options. They followed their instinct—and the smell of the sick—as they searched for the imprisoned Hosts.

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Gael glanced down at the food piled on the metal cart. It was mostly thick meat stew and dense, black bread. A lucky few would get some boiled-to-death vegetables, and an even luckier few would get one or two bruised fruits.

“... Not bad,” he said, poking the fruits with his finger as they rounded another corner, wheeling down a narrower hall. “People in Blightmarch would knife each other politely for a bowl of this stew. I guess the Steelborn really want their Myrmur miners to live.”

Maeve walked ahead a few steps, shoulders angled as she sniffed here and there. “I smell Myrmur Hosts… down the left. At least ten of them. Relatively late stage in the parasitization.”

“Gotta hurry then.”

He followed her, letting her lead by scent. It was easier than trying to navigate by the factory’s apparent layout. The place had clearly been rearranged six times in the last decade and then abandoned halfheartedly each time.

As they passed a row of chained storage tanks, then a rusted overhead crane, Maeve whispered at him.

“So we got past the guards, but how, exactly, are we going to destroy every Myrmur heart in here? Are you going to perform surgery on every single Host here?”

He snorted. “Do I look like I’ve got thirty pairs of hands and a time dilation field lying around? Surgery would take too long. We can’t be the only guards patrolling inside the factory, so I’d rather not get disturbed while I’m elbow-deep in someone’s stomach.”

“Then what?”

“I’m gonna try a new technique.”

Finally, they came to a long, narrow hallway that looked like it’d once been used for loading crates. The side walls had been torn out and replaced with thick bar-fronted cells, while weak lanterns hung at intervals from the ceiling, throwing enough light to reveal the crowded bodies inside each cell.

There were three dozen of them at least, all men and women in ragged clothes curled up on the floor, sat against the bars, or collared like beasts. Chains ran from those collars to bolted rings on the metal walls.

His Umbral Eyes flared. He let the red in his vision sharpen, eyeing all of the glowing second hearts inside their bodies.

“All of their Myrmur hearts are in their lungs,” he said quietly, rolling his cart down the line of cells. None of the Hosts even bothered looking up at the two of them. “Most likely, they inhaled the little Grave-Class buggers while they were working in the mines.”

He gave the cart handle one last push, bringing it to a stop in the middle of the hallway. A few faces turned toward them, but they were so gaunt and hollow-eyed it barely seemed like they registered he was wearing a Raven’s mask. That was good. They didn’t panic, which allowed him to reach freely into his coat and pull out a bunch of small glass vials, each of them filled with shimmering, viscous liquid.

Half of them were red, half of them were blue.

“Fortunately for us,” he said, uncorking the vials one by one, “ since all of their Myrmur hearts are in the same place, I don’t have to tailor anything individually. This should work quickly.”

“What will?”

“Dinner upgrade.”

He tipped the viscous liquids into the communal pots on the cart, stirring them in with a handy ladle. Then he reached again into his coat and withdrew a few small pouches of his powdered symbiote elixir, tapping the contents into the stews as well.

When he was satisfied, he nudged her with his elbow. “Serving time. Make sure everyone gets at least one full bowl.”

Maeve frowned, searching his mask for an explanation, but then resigned. Together, they moved down the hallway and began passing bowls through the bars. Trembling hands received each bowl, and a few quiet ‘thank yours’ drifted out, though nobody was still conscious enough to realize the two of them were not their usual guards.

When the last bowl scraped through the final set of bars, they pushed the empty carts aside and stepped back to the end of the hallway.

“What’d you put in their stew again?” Maeve whispered.

“A fatal poison,” he replied.

“... What?”

The instanthe spoke, the first Host—an old man—let out a wet, strangled gurgle and collapsed face-first into the ground.

Maeve’s gasp echoed down the corridor, but then another Host toppled backwards, limbs convulsing. Then a third slumped sideways, choking on her breath. Within seconds, the entire hallway became a grotesque chain reaction of coughs, gags, jerking bodies, and bowls clattering against stone—until every single person lay limp and unmoving on the ground.

Maeve spun toward him, frantic. “What’d you—”

“Relax,” he drawled, leaning casually on his cane. “They’ll come back in a bit.”

She blinked. “I don’t… what?”

“All of their Myrmur hearts are lodged in the lung tissue, so if we want to kill them all at the same time without any open surgeries, we just need a lethal poison that acts only on the lungs,” he explained. “The red poison goes in, the Myrmur heart dies with the Host’s lungs, and then the slow-acting blue antidote intercepts the poison. Then the powdered symbiote elixir intercepts the killing curse from the dying Myrmur heart, which will take around… thirty seconds?”

Before Maeve could muster a response, the first fallen man spasmed. He jerked violently, sucked in a torn, wheezing breath, then rolled onto his side and hacked viciously. Black ichor splattered from his mouth.

The second Host jolted awake with a ragged inhale. The third started gasping like she’d surfaced from drowning.

As the rest of the Myrmur Hosts began waking one by one, Maeve stared at them all, wide-eyed.

“Incredible,” she breathed. “Does this mean we don’t have to do surgery on Myrmur Hosts anymore? After all, you’ve found a way to destroy Myrmur hearts without—”

“This only worked because all of their Myrmur hearts were in their lungs. Besides, the lethal poison may be strong enough to kill the hearts, but the lumps of bioarcanic meat are still in there.” He shook his head. “If we leave them in the lungs, they’ll rot. Or ferment. Or explode. I dunno what happens if you leave a foreign bioarcanic flesh lump in someone’s body for an extended period of time.”

“So… we still have to operate on all of them?”

“Yep. But at least now their Myrmurs are dead, so we can just bust them out and take them to Arnell’s place where we can take our sweet time cutting them open—”

A giant chitinous limb tore through the bars on his left before he finished his sentence, slamming into his side like a battering ram. It tore through his coat, his shirt, his undershirt—and then clanged off his apotoxic chitin, releasing a hiss of toxin that immediately made the limb reel back.

Unfortunately, the blow still launched him into the wall at the end of the hallway, his back arching as he hit the metal spine-first.

“Gael!” Maeve shouted.

His vision pulsed black around the edges as he fell onto his ass, but he forced himself upright just enough to look.

One of the Hosts wasn’t waking up normally like the others. The unconscious young lady stood up slowly, her limbs jerking in unnatural directions. Deep green flesh squirmed out from her skin, then writhed and ballooned across her body, coating her limbs in organic armor. Segmented plates erupted over her torso. Her head vanished beneath a mask of chitin, and within seconds, her entire body was enveloped by a larger, humanoid bug.

What remained at the end of the transformation was a gigantic humanoid stick bug, with four spindly arms and an equally long torso.

“... Fortunately for us,” he rasped, finishing the thought he’d started before he was thrown, “that lethal poison is only lethal for Wretch-Class Myrmurs and below. As I thought, it wouldn’t kill a Blight-Class Myrmur heart.”

Maeve stared at the towering monster as it smashed the rest of the bars aside to climb out, making the rest of the prisoners around it shriek in terror.

“In fact, I think the lethal poison only made it angry. It must’ve removed the stabilizer’s effect as well, allowing it to finally manifest externally again,” he finished. “In short, we’ve found our Blight-Class Myrmur. There’s a high chance this one’s artificially implanted, too, given our eyes didn’t flash super red while we were looking at its Host.”

The giant stick bug screeched and lunged at them.

Gael waved his cane at it absentmindedly.

“Do your thing, Maeve.”