The Exorcist Doctor

Chapter 130 - Investigators // Are Never Local

For two days and two nights, Arnell’s forge was no longer thick with the scent of scorched oil and iron filings. Now it was just boiled rags and the clean, iron sting of fresh blood. It was also never fully quiet. Even when the coal beds died down and everyone turned over to sleep, there was always something—someone coughing by the wall, someone sobbing into a sleeve, or someone’s boots thudding as they scooped some stew for themselves.

Most of the time, though, it was just Gael chugging more bottles of alcohol as he reached to operate on the next patient.

Two days. Two nights. Thirty-seven patients’ chests opened, ribs pried, lungs peeled back, and dead Myrmur hearts dug out like rotten fruit. He’d done so much cutting his hands that they felt like they belonged to somebody else. Truth was, he hadn’t thought removing dead Myrmur hearts would be that strenuous a task, and considering all of the hearts were in their lungs, he’d thought it’d be simple cut-and-harvest operations… but no.

Scientific progress has been made.

Note to all future surgeons working on Myrmur hearts: they rapidly crystallize and graft themselves to the person’s innards if they aren’t quickly removed from the body within four hours.

But two nights later, he’d done it. Now thirty-six of thirty-seven rescued Hosts sat along the walls of the forge, wrapped in blankets and bandages and being fed Arnell’s shitty chicken stew. Some stared at their hands like they didn’t trust them anymore. Some held their bowls with shaking fingers. A few kept craning their heads toward the exit as if expecting the Steelborn to kick the door in at any time, though Arnell seemed confident the gangsters would never track them here.

Gael and Maeve finally collapsed onto the sofa in the center of the forge as the thirty-seventh Host—the lady carrying the Blight-Class Myrmur—lay safe on the workbench beside them, her breaths steadied and her chest stitched shut.

… And that’s all of them.

Snack time.

He reached for the tray beside the sofa. On it were strips of cooked Blight-Class Myrmur meat—dark, fibrous, and seasoned aggressively with metallic salts, courtesy of Arnell’s culinary skills. He popped one into his mouth and chewed like it was holy communion. Maeve did the same, but slower. They’d been chewing on these strips every hour for the past two days just to keep themselves awake, but Saintess, Gael didn’t think he could get bored of them.

The man can cook.

Maybe I should drag him back to Blightmarch and force him work in Miss Alba’s shop.

As they ate in silence, Maeve’s eyes stayed on the sleeping woman.

“Are we just going to wait for her to wake up?” she mumbled.

“Unfortunately, yes,” he mumbled back. “Adrenaline’s a lovely drug, but using it on someone who was a Blight-Class Myrmur Host isn’t the same as using it on someone who was a Wretch-Class Myrmur Host. She’s a lot weaker than Arnell was, so waking her up forcefully could be dangerous. We’ll just have to wait and question her afterwards.”

“And if she doesn’t wake up for a while?”

He shrugged. “Maybe there’s someone else we could ask about artificial Myrmur Hosts.”

They looked at each other. Then at the double-doors tucked away at the back of the forge. Then they finished their meat strips, patted themselves down to look as presentable as possible, and wobbled off the sofa to head to the back.

Gael kicked the doors open—and Arnell smith gave him the finger and shouted at him to treat the place nicely from across the forge—but there wasn’t much in here to treat nicely to begin with. This room at the back of the forge used to be Arnell’s bedroom, but they’d since repurposed it into a containment cell by throwing out all the furniture, removing every loose object that could be used as a weapon, and leaving only a thin, dimly lit lantern on the ceiling for light.

The Exorcist pair were chained and bound separately, sitting on the ground. The man rested against the left side of the wall, beside the grimy window that he couldn’t possibly see out of, while the lady rested against the right side of the wall, leaning her head against a cushion built into the wall that Gael hadn’t felt like removing. A small bit of comfort for the lady was fine, he’d thought.

Gael dragged a chair into the room and sat on it reversed, arms slung over the backrest. Maeve stood slightly behind him, leaving a small crack in the doors so a bit of light from the forge could brighten up the room.

Then all four of them exchanged glances, and silence reigned for a moment.

“... All Exorcists stationed down in Bharncair are rejects of the organization,” Gael began. “Or they’re weaklings. Or they’re bored. Or they’re the kind of people who treat ‘duty’ like a theater performance. They go out, kill a few eyesore Myrmur Hosts, write a shitty report claiming they’d fill their quota, and send it up to Vharnviel. Then they go back to sitting on their asses and collecting their stipends. At least, that’s what my dearest wife tells me.”

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The man’s eyes sharpened, and he glared up at Gael like he wanted to spit acid through his iron gas mask.

Gael continued anyway, unbothered. “And Vharnveil doesn’t really care. Not really. Because the silver-tongued love the idea of control more than the reality of it. ‘Look, we have Exorcists in Bharncair!’ they say. ‘Look, we’re maintaining order!’ they say. Meanwhile, the local gangs are the ones maintaining the order, and the real suffering happens in the alleys where nobody can hear it.” He leaned forward on his chair, fingers tapping the wood. “So I guess what I’m asking is… why, pray tell, are two Exorcists in Ironwych actually doing their job? What’s your problem? What the fuck are you bothering us for?”

The man’s gaze flicked past Gael, landing on Maeve instead.

“I can ask you the same thing,” he growled. “What’s the exiled, disgraced Hunter doing in Ironwych—in my

territory, exorcising Myrmurs like she has the right?”Maeve narrowed her eyes. “You know of me.”

“Everyone does. The infamous Hunter who killed her batch of trainees during her graduation test. You couldn’t walk into a hall without hearing it.”

A muscle in her cheek twitched. She didn’t look irritated or angry, exactly, but she looked… sadder.

Gael watched her for half a second, then reached into his coat and pulled out a bottle of alcohol, smashing it across the side of the man’s head with a crisp, glassy crack. The man’s head snapped to the side, and the chained lady on the other side of the room let out a startled cry.

“Jin! Stop antagonizing—”

“Oh, yeah, we forgot to introduce ourselves.” Gael tossed the broken bottle neck aside and grinned. “I’m Gael, and this is Maeve, my dearest wife. Nice to meet you.”

The man’s eyes burned, blood trickling down his temple. He didn’t speak, but he somehow managed to glare even harder at Gael. Thankfully, that wasn’t the case for his partner, because the lady immediately swallowed and spoke for both of them herself.

“I’m Vivienne, and he’s Jin!” she said quickly. “Don’t hit him anymore, please!”

“Don’t give a shit, Jin and Vivi. You newly appointed Exorcists in Ironwych?”

Vivi nodded fast. “Yes. Newly appointed. The Purity Tribunal sent us down here just a month ago—”

“For what?”

“To exorcize Myrmurs. That’s our job, right?”

Gael craned his head over to look at her properly, scowling. “Then what the hell were you doing in that factory?”

Vivi hesitated. Her eyes flicked to Jin, then back to Gael’s mask, then to Maeve’s briefcase. She swallowed again, and her voice softened.

“We’ve… heard about you,” she admitted. “Over the past few weeks, we’ve heard someone has been exterminating Myrmurs all across Ironwych at a rate much, much higher than any Exorcist that has ever been stationed here. Also, we… we heard people saying the Hosts weren’t being killed. Like the Myrmurs were simply removed from them.”

Gael shared a proud look with Maeve.

We’re famous, dearest wife.

“We couldn’t believe it, of course,” Vivi blabbered on. “We couldn’t find any of the Hosts that were supposedly ‘cured’, so… we followed the tracks. We tried to predict where you’d be next, what’d you do next, and then… we were just in the area that night when we heard a ruckus in the factory. It was known Steelborn territory, but we still broke in, and when we saw you two standing over that unconscious lady, Jin thought you were harvesting her organs, so—”

“So you came in guns blazing.”

Vivi nodded, shame twisting her shoulders inward. “Yes. But…” She peered past the two of them, towards the slit in the doors where the rescued Hosts were resting along the walls of the forge. “We were mistaken. It’s true, then. You… you can cure Myrmur Hosts without killing them. How?”

Gael didn’t answer the question. Instead, he looked at Maeve, and she looked back at him.

‘So they’re actually just normal Exorcists’, her eyes said. ‘They’re doing what they were trained to do.’

He let the thought sit. He didn’t like it, but unfortunately, he couldn’t deny it either. Vivi didn’t seem to be lying. They’d been annoying bastards back in the Gulch Pipelines, and they’d been even more annoying back in the factory, but they were just naive Exorcists trying to earn their pay.

It meant they weren’t worth keeping chained.

He sighed through his mask and rocked back slightly on the chair, wood creaking beneath his weight.

“... Well,” he said at last, “I guess this is all just a bit of an unfortunate misunderstanding, then. Truth is, we’re not here to plant roots. Ironwych ain’t ours. We’re not here to clean it up, rule it, or pretend we give a damn about jurisdiction." He tilted his head at Jin and Vivi. “We’re investigating something, you see.”

Vivi swallowed hard. “Investigating… what?”

“Artificial Myrmur Hosts. The ones that explode after you kill the Myrmur, like that man in the pipes and that lady you tried to kill me over in the factory.”

Surprisingly, it was Jin whose eyes sharpened instantly, fatigue and anger snapping into something… focused. Vivi’s breath caught as well, her fingers curling tight against her chains.

Gael noticed both of their reactions.

“All we want to know is who’s doing it, and why,” he continued. “Once we have that answer, we’ll leave, so here’s the deal: you don’t interfere with our work, and we won’t interfere with yours. We’re not here to make Ironwych our problems. Now, before I unchain you, do either of you know anything about these artificial Hosts?”

Jin lifted his head. “It started in Vharnveil.”

Gael’s interest sparked immediately. “Oh? So you do know something?”

“I’ve been investigating them myself, too. They—”

The forge shook violently as an explosion rattled the building behind them, and the overhead lantern swung hard, chains rattling as a deep concussive boom rolled through the forge.

Screams from outside followed—not pain at first, but raw, unfiltered panic.

“Steelborn!” someone shouted. “Steelborn are here!”