The Exorcist Doctor

Chapter 128 - A Bloom // Against Oblivion

Maeve needed no further asking.

The instant Gael told her to move, she was already moving. While the giant stick bug lunged at her, four staff-like forelimbs smashing through what was left of the cell front, she flipped her briefcase up and snapped it into umbrella form. The chitin limb slammed against the reinforced canopy with a ringing crack that shuddered all the way down her arms.

“Run on, now!” Gael shouted at the prisoners. “If you can stand, get up and run to thirteen lower soot district, Bloodiron & Sons Forge! Tell the man there that the Raven sent you, and then stay there unless you want the rotting heart inside you to rot you too!”

The prisoners seemed confused at first. Hesitant to be taking orders from a Raven. Then they saw the Myrmur trying to rip Maeve’s head off, and they scrambled. Gael tossed some of them tiny bonesaws from his neverending coat to free themselves of their collars, and very quickly, three dozen bodies dissolved into a panicked sprint out of the hallway.

The stick bug ignored them all. It tried to shove her back into the wall, and it’d win if it came down to a pure contest of strength, but if she had to distil everything she’d learned about fighting Myrmurs over the past two years into one magic phrase, it’d be this:

“Safety locks one to eight, disengaging!” she shouted.

“Go for it,” Gael said cheerily.

She flicked the eight safety locks on the umbrella’s shaft in sequence, and her heart sped up, pushing blood through the handle and towards the tip. With a final thumb of the trigger, she fired a roaring column of blood straight into the stick bug.

The blood cannon picked it up like a doll and hurled it through the bars, through the far wall, and out into the guts of the factory with a shriek of bending metal and a shower of shards. The entire hallway shook. Prisoners, mid-stagger, went down again with yelps as dust rained from the ceiling.

Surely the Steelborn guards know we’re here by now, but…

Oh well.

“I’ll be right behind you,” Gael groaned, waving her through the hole in the wall. “Just gotta… take a breather first—”

Of course he’d be fine, so she didn’t wait for him to finish his sentence before vaulting through the hole with her umbrella opened.

On the other side, she fell through a dark expanse of abandoned factory line. It was cavernous, lit only by a few sputtering lamps and what little moonlight seeped through cracks in the ceiling. Dead conveyor belts ran like ossified tongues through the space, weaving between hulking machines, and as she fell, she was lost in their complex design. Who knew rusted stamping presses, giant assembly arms locked in mid-reach, and giant metal drums that loomed like cauldrons could look so pretty even in a dilapidated state?

Her boots rang on the metal ground as she landed twenty meters down. Then she straightened, umbrella resting on her shoulder as she frowned into the dark.

Wherever the Myrmur had landed, it wasn’t beneath her. It must’ve made a quick recovery and skittered off into the shadows of the vast machineries.

Where are you now?

She steadied her breathing, sweeping the rust-littered shadows as she tried to follow the bug’s trail. Its scent shifted strangely—an acrid, leaf-rot tang twisting in ways the air shouldn’t—so the instant her Scent Latch mutation flared, she spun and snapped her umbrella up.

Dangling off an overhead platform, the giant stick bug tried to decapitate her from behind, but she managed to block and instantly pivot into a blood cannon shot. It missed. The stick bug bent its entire body and folded into itself like paper, reducing its size drastically before it swung away into the shadows again.

Tch.

What, exactly, does a stick bug do again?

[Identification Complete]

[Name: Timema Stick Bug]

[Grade: E-Rank Blight-Class]

[Passive Mutation: Phasmocryptid Limbs]

[Brief Description: The timema stick bug can fold and snap every joint in its body without permanent damage. Furthermore, the joint snapping does not release any sound]

[Swarmblood Art: Phasmocryptid Coloration]

[Brief Description: The timema stick bug can temporarily halt the flow of its bioarcanic essence, reducing its presence. Furthermore, by concentrating bioarcanic essence on its chitin plates, it can change colors and camouflage itself even better]

[Swarmblood Aura: ~2,600]

[Strength: ~8, Speed: ~8, Toughness: ~12, Dexterity: ~16, Perception: ~7]

She grimaced as she whirled and deflected another attack from the shadows again, the stick bug using the myriad of machines, platforms, and walkways to swing itself around the factory.

So it’s thin, gangly, dextrous with all six limbs, and it can make itself extremely hard to hit.

An ambush-type Myrmur, then?

In a way, ambush-types were even more annoying than Myrmurs that fought her head-on. At least with those, it was just about a contest of strength. Ambush-types forced her to think a little more, and that was the last thing she wanted to do in a fight for her life.

But ambush-types were weak once they were dragged out into the light.

As she deflected one more crescent swing from the stick bug before it folded away, slinking into the shadows, she spread her feet and thumbed the extension button on her umbrella, elongating the shaft until it was the length of a full-on staff.

Then she stabbed the handle into the ground, thumbed the swirling button, and disengaged safety locks nine to twelve.

Gears whirled. Chains rattled. As the canopy began spinning with the force of three additional safety locks disengaged—which she’d added over the past year and a half—she poured blood into the handle and unleashed her toxic blood in a violent outwards bloom. The glowing green droplets sizzled as they splashed everywhere. It burned concrete, it corroded cold machinery, and as the umbrella threatened to spin itself out of control, she grabbed it with both hands and lifted it into the air, continuing to swirl it around like a magical stave.

This was wanton destruction on a scale she’d never managed before, and she could never use this in a crowded space—just because she could control whether or not her blood was toxic didn’t mean the sheer force of her blood wouldn’t kill—but in this abandoned factory, she was more than happy to try out this attack.

Hah!

This is fun!

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

She couldn’t help a grin as she swirled blood everywhere, struggling to reign in Mistrender. ‘Crushing Tarsagrip’ was the right choice after all, allowing her to hold onto her umbrella without getting flung off by its momentum and recoil, and soon…

Something shrieked behind her, its dark camouflage flickering and tearing apart as luminous blood clung to its carapace.

She turned sharply and aimed at it, dropping to a knee for extra stability.

“Got you.”

She disengaged the final, thirteenth safety lock—a move she wouldn’t even have dared

try by herself without ‘Crushing Tarsagrip’ and Gael gripping the extended shaft behind her to handle the recoil—and fired straight ahead.The first high-pressure blood cannon hit the stick bug dead center, blasting it through two small machines and slamming it into a far conveyor belt in a spray of shattered metal. The second cannon slammed it through the conveyor belt. The third cannon blasted it through a metal pillar, the fourth pinned it against a large cauldron, and then she went to town with it.

Every recoil hit her arms like hammer blows, but her strengthened grip locked the umbrella steady, absorbing the shock while she advanced steadily. Thank the Saintess Gael wasn’t just slacking off, because he was also feeding blood—and attribute levels—through their ankle chain to sustain her non-stop cannons.

You’re not going anywhere.

The stick bug screamed, its limbs rippling and flexing as it tried to run. She didn’t let it. Whenever it lifted even a fraction, she hammered it down again with another cannon that echoed like a blasting charge. Toxic blood smeared across its body, eating through its chitin. Each shot melted more of its carapace away until its shell started to bubble and slough off like tar in fire, so she kept advancing, kept shooting, ignoring the wails and the screams until the stick bug finally stopped trying to get up.

Only once the Myrmur finally sagged—twitching and alive, but utterly ruined—did she lower her umbrella a little, planting her foot down on the giant bug’s chest.

Gael arrived just as she was deciding whether or not to feel guilty about how much fun she was having. He dropped through the hole in the wall above like a very disgruntled bat, coat flaring, and dust followed him down in a soft shower. She barely spared him a glance.

“Perfect timing,” she said.

She yanked the trigger a few more times for good measure. The point-blank blood cannons shot off its arms, legs, and then she started swirling it like a drill to impale its head into the ground. Given the Host’s body was inside its long torso, there was no harm in doing so.

“Deal with it already, Gael—”

“Already on it,” he muttered back, striding up to its steaming torso. Sliding his bladed cane free, he simply drew the blade down in a clean, straight line from the bug’s collar region to its lower ribs.

Its torso immediately split under the cut like rotten bark.

First things first, Gael delved into the steaming cavity and yanked out the unconscious woman from strands of meat and Myrmur tissue. Her skin was waxy and her pulse was visibly weak, but she was undeniably still alive. That was good enough for the two of them.

While Maeve continued bludgeoning the fallen stick bug with Mistrender, keeping it from even trying to recover, Gael began cutting open the woman’s chest. For her part, Maeve had long since become desensitized to his ‘impossible’ surgeries with minimum equipment, but seeing him open up her lungs with barely any light from his Gloam Lantern was still impressive to behold.

The pulsing knot that was the Myrmur heart was finally exposed, lodged inside the woman’s left lung. Gael wasted no time shining his Gloam Lantern on it to intercept the killing curse, but just as he was about to rip the heart out, Maeve blinked.

“Wait. What about the bomb?”

Gael paused, one hand hovering just above the Myrmur heart.

“If we kill or remove the heart, the bomb will go off. Isn’t that how it works?” she continued. “Shouldn’t you look for the bomb first?”

“If I had higher perception, maybe I could hear it ticking around somewhere,” he said, shrugging. “But I don’t. Can’t exactly remove a bomb when I can’t pinpoint where it’s buried, and I can’t just leave her stomach open for hours while I dig around for it. She’ll die of shock or infection first.”

“So what do we—”

“My experimental method.”

From his coat, he produced something that—at first—made no sense at all in this grim industrial graveyard.

It was a small, pink flower. It looked almost comical in his fingers with its delicate petals, soft color, and a thin stem ending in a tangle of threadlike roots, but he held it with surprising gentleness as he angled it towards the woman’s open lung.

“Wait,” Maeve blurted. “What are you—”

“It’ll work,” he muttered “Probably.”

That ‘probably’ didn’t comfort her at all, but he lowered the flower until its roots brushed the woman’s exposed flesh. The moment the roots brushed living flesh, they curled and began burrowing into the tissue with a swift, hungry wriggle that made Maeve’s skin crawl.

The flower pulsed and perked up as it attached itself to the woman’s lung, satisfied.

Maeve’s frown deepened.

“That’s… parasitic.”

“Yep. And now, I just do this.”

He hooked his fingers around the black Myrmur heart and yanked. The heart tore free with a wet pop, thick tendrils snapping as he jerked it loose and crushed it in his hand, ichor splattering across the ground.

Maeve instinctively braced for the blast, squeezing her eyes shut, but… nothing happened.

When she opened her eyes, the factory looked exactly the same. No blast crater. No ringing shockwave. No burst of scorching heat.

The bomb didn’t detonate.

“... There we go.” Gael sighed. “Lovely.”

He tossed aside the dead organ and, without missing a beat, pulled out a needle and thread. As he began stitching the woman closed with brisk, practiced motions, he gestured vaguely at the stick bug carcass Maeve was standing on.

“Let’s butcher as much of this Blight-Class meat as we can carry back to the forge. The arms and legs are gone, but the torso should still roast nicely.”

She nodded, putting her umbrella down, and began ripping the torso apart with her bare hands. Her new grip strength made the task feel almost insultingly easy, though it was made even easier because the Myrmur had half-melted under her toxic blood already.

Still, curiosity gnawed at her.

“What’d you just do?” she asked. “How’d you stop the bomb from going off?”

Gael tied off a stitch and snipped the thread with a relaxed hum. “Well, I thought about it a little. Obviously, the condition for detonation is the removal of the Myrmur heart, but how does the bomb know when to explode? What is it observing? What is it tracking? Is it detecting the bioarcanic essence in the body? Is it specifically detecting the pheromones or mass of the Myrmur heart?”

“I… don’t know?”

“Neither did I. I figured it probably wasn’t tracking pure bioarcanic essence because nobody has the tech to do that specifically yet, and I figured it can’t possibly be tracking pheromones or anything of the sort because that’s too vague, but it had to be unique to Myrmurs in general. The bomb had to be tracking something related to what Myrmurs uniquely are… and then I figured it out.”

“... Exoparasitism.”

He pointed at the pink flower now latched gently onto the woman’s lung, its roots faintly pulsing.

“Exoparasitism,” he repeated. “A Myrmur is an exoparasitic manifestation—a pretty rare trait for a parasite—so I figured the bomb’s activation condition was very likely determined by whether or not it could detect a foreign exoparasite. If yes, it’d do nothing. If no… boom.”

Realization dawned on Maeve slowly. “So when you introduced the exoparasitic flower and removed the Myrmur heart…”

“The bomb is tricked into thinking there’s still a foreign parasite in the body,” he finished, nodding. “It’s a small, mostly harmless flower that takes root inside a human body before growing out through the skin, so it functions almost exactly like a Myrmur heart and the manifested Myrmur.. Granted, I’ll still have to remove it eventually before it sucks up too much nutrients and life force, but it’s not nearly as harmful a parasite as a Myrmur. I can take my time with it after I dig out the bomb.”

She couldn’t help the grin spreading under her mask. “You’ve done it again.”

He made another vague shrugging motion, stitching the last seam. “What can I say? I’d hate to explode. Now, before the Steelborn guards get her, let’s grab the lady and haul ass back to the—”

A hiss cut him off.

Then a beam of mud-thick blood fired down from above.

Gael jerked his head aside by what looked like drunken instinct, and the beam punched into the ground where he’d been standing, instantly hardening into a jagged spire of solid clay.

“What the fuck?” he muttered.

Both of them snapped their gazes up.

High above, balanced on a rust-choked pipe that ran along the upper reaches of the factory wall, stood two shadowed silhouettes. One wore a metal gauntlet with a hole in the palm, pointing it straight down at them, while the other stood behind the first with a flimsy rifle in hand.

Maeve scowled.

She recognized the two of them as the pair of Exorcists from the Gulch Pipelines.