The Exorcist Doctor

The Breeder had talked a big game about dealing with the two of them, but three minutes into the fight, Jin found himself wondering if the old bastard had spent too many years cutting people open and not enough years learning how to actually throw hands.

The laboratory had already ceased to be a laboratory. Papers scattered in wild drifts across the floor. Glass tubes burst under stray impacts. Workbenches split. Shelves collapsed. The surgical table with the crying boy still strapped onto it was one of the last intact pieces of furniture on the floor, but the Breeder had shoved it aside to the far wall, making it one less thing to worry about.

Everything else was motion.

Jin launched himself off a wall pipe as one of the Breeder’s mantis scythes cut through the space where his spine had been. The blade sheared through brass tubing instead, spilling steam and some pale preservative fluid across the wall. Jin twisted mid-air, fired a short burst of mudblood from his gauntlet, and used the recoil to slam himself onto a dangling surgical arm near the ceiling. The machinery swayed under his weight. Below, the Breeder snarled and spun, green-black chitin scraping against the floor as his four mantis arms spread wide.

***

[Identification Complete]

[Name: Shield Mantis]

[Grade: C-Rank Blight-Class]

[Passive Mutation: Bastion Carapace]

[Brief Description: The shield mantis possesses an exceptionally reinforced dorsal carapace capable of absorbing heavy impacts and dispersing force across its entire frame]

[Swarmblood Art: Aegis Scythes]

[Brief Description: The shield mantis can concentrate bioarcanic essence into its scythes, transmuting them into shield-like scythes that greatly increases their defensive surface area and impact resistance]

[Swarmblood Aura: ~3,300]

[Strength: ~10, Speed: ~7, Toughness: ~6, Dexterity: ~9, Perception: ~6]

***

Jin had never fought a C-Rank Blight-Class before. The strongest Myrmurs he had to fight were the four E-Rank milkweed bugs in the wine-processing facility. By all accounts, a C-Rank Blight-Class inside a sealed laboratory should’ve made every instinct in him reach for retreat.

But Maeve was here.

Across the laboratory, she also landed lightly atop a rotating surgical machine bolted to the ceiling. The Breeder noticed her and his scythes came for her in a savage rush, one slash after another, cutting wide enough to tear the hanging brass arms apart. Metal screamed. Glass rained down. Another cloud of torn papers spun through the air like panicked moths, but Maeve ducked under the first, leaned back from the second, stepped sideways on a swaying platform no wider than a stool, and looked almost bored by the third.

“Will you come back down?” the Breeder snapped. His scythes carved through another hanging machine, splitting it in half. Maeve hopped neatly to the next fixture as sparks spat down between them. “You’re making this tedious!”

Maeve tilted her head. “Why would we do that? We’re Wasp-Classes with good agility. Did you expect us to stand still and let you chop us up politely?”

The Breeder’s irritation sharpened. His mantis body crouched, two scythe-arms stretching into a wide cross beneath her. The next strike came with real force, both blades screaming upward through the air in an intersecting arc meant to turn her escape routes into ribbons, but Maeve didn’t retreat. She jumped instead. One second she was on the ground, and in the next her feet struck the glass dome overhead.

For half a breath, she stood upside down against the curved glass, dress and emerald fabric snapping around her while the night sky framed her silhouette.

Then she angled her umbrella straight down at the Breeder.

Jin understood what she was doing a split second before she kicked off, and the glass dome shattered beneath her feet.

A shower of glass fell with her as she descended like a green blade from the sky, umbrella point aimed squarely at the Breeder’s head. The old man reacted fast, Jin would give him that. All four arms came up, his two scythes warping and thickening into broad shield plates—but Maeve hit him anyways. The impact blew the waves of papers around them flat, and Jin felt the shock through the pipe beneath his feet, a hard tremor that rattled his bones and almost made him lose his balance.

Maeve’s umbrella point drove into the layered scythe-shields, stopped for half a second, then pressed deeper as her whole body followed through with the momentum.The Breeder snarled through clenched teeth.

“You can’t—”

“Why do all of you like to talk while fighting?”

Maeve thumbed a button on her handle, and the umbrella began to spin. The closed canopy whirred into a drill-like blur. Toxic green light flooded through its seams as Maeve fed her blood into the weapon, and the whirring sound quickly changed from metallic pressure to meat-grinding violence. The Breeder’s scythe-shields shrieked as the spinning umbrella chewed into them, ripping through reinforced chitin, muscle strands, and whatever bioarcanic mutation held the defense together.

One scythe-shield cracked apart. Then the other tore open in a burst of dark blood. The Breeder threw himself back with a grimace before the umbrella could punch through to the top of his skull, tumbling across the paper-choked floor and smashing into a workbench hard enough to collapse it.

Maeve hit the ground where he’d been, and the umbrella drilled straight into the floor, nearly taking the entire room down with it.

“... The first Blight-Class Myrmur I fought was F-Rank,” she said plainly, yanking her umbrella out of the floor with a hard pull as she began walking towards the Breeder. Paper crunched under her shoes. “Back then, I needed Gael beside me so he could supply fresh blood and drain my toxic blood away while I fought.”

The Breeder kept shuffling away, one hand dragging through loose papers as he tried desperately to regenerate his scythes.

“But that was over two years ago,” Maeve continued. “If I get serious, I’m pretty sure I can beat even a B-Rank Blight-Class Myrmur alone, so don’t fuck with me and just give up. We have questions for you.”

But from his perch on the pipe, Jin scowled down at the two of them.

Something was wrong.

The Breeder’s fear was too large. His collapse too complete. A mere ‘doctor’ he may be, a man who could cut open children beneath an open glass dome wouldn’t crumble that neatly after one bad exchange. Jin had seen this sort of performance in Vharnveil before—men like rats in velvet gloves. His father’s shop had brought in all sorts. Merchants with rings on every finger who pretended their coffers were empty so they could haggle over service fees. Patrons who spoke with watery eyes about sick relatives, then arrived the next week in a new carriage. Rich wives who trembled like lambs until the contract shifted in their favor and their teeth showed. The Vharnish were people who could make weakness into a weapon sharper than any knife.

So he knew the Breeder was playing pathetic.

“Maeve!” he shouted. “Get back! He’s planning somet—”

But she was already near enough to strike the old man with her umbrella, and in a split second, the Breeder’s mantis helm unfurled. His normal face appeared behind it, wrinkled and sweating, but his eyes were bright with glee and childlike wonder.

“Noted,” he said.

And the living mantis armor recoiled into his body—pinkish-purple muscle strands retracting through his skin—before a new set of muscle strands exploded from him, enveloping him whole.

Immediately, two massive armored wings snapped out from his back with a crack of displaced air. Their chitined ridges caught the lanternlight and ignited with a toxic orange radiance, making Jin look away on instinct, but Maeve was closer. The flash of light hit her full in the face. She flinched, staggering several steps back with a hiss, and that allowed the Breeder to launch himself up with a beat of his massive wings, flinging papers and broken glass around the lab.

The man’s status interface flickered again as Jin looked up at him, scowling.

***

[Identification Complete]

[Name: Netwing Beetle]

[Grade: C-Rank Blight-Class]

[Passive Mutation: Biohazard Frame]

[Brief Description: In addition to tough inherent chitin plates, the netwing beetle’s wings take on subtle poisonous colors and patterns that repel weaker bugs]

[Swarmblood Art: Deathflare Display]

[Brief Description: The netwing beetle concentrate bioarcanic essence into its wings, intensifying the visual effect into a blinding flash capable of stunning, disorienting, and even poisoning nearby targets]

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

[Swarmblood Aura: ~3,100]

[Strength: ~9, Speed: ~6, Toughness: ~10, Dexterity: ~6, Perception: ~6]

***

“Hah!” The Breeder laughed, his new living beetle armor fitting closely around his body. “So that’s how long it takes to swap from one Myrmur to another. Fascinating. Utterly fascinating.”

“Superparasitism, huh?” Maeve muttered, adjusting her grip on her umbrella as she steadied her feet. “I didn’t think I’d see another case of it after Evelyn, but whatever. Still not letting you leave.”

Her umbrella began spinning again, green light crawling through the seams as she charged it with toxic blood—but despite her bravado, Jin knew their time was running out.

The Breeder had to fall before they overdosed on their own blood.

Gael had always believed there were only three ways to survive being attacked by a small army of Myrmurs.

The first was to have Maeve nearby.

The second was to have enough alcohol in his bloodstream that fear got lost trying to find his liver.

The third was to move very, very quickly.

Unfortunately, Maeve wasn’t here, his alcohol was wearing thin, and the moving quickly part was also becoming an increasingly athletic nuisance for a man who hadn’t done much exercise in the past year and a half.

An ant-like Myrmur lunged at him from the left, four arms spread wide, red-black chitin gleaming. He ducked under the first two claws, drove the hooked end of his cane into its ankle, and yanked. The Myrmur stumbled. His three hungry flowers bloomed across his other hand a heartbeat later, thick petals snapping open before he wrenched them shut. Four Myrmurs lost their heads in the crunch, and when he swept his flowers aside like a flail, four more were sent flying into a stack of coffins by the side of the catacombs.

Still, there were so, so, so many more of them. It was all he could do to keep running up the stairs of the catacombs in circles, trying to outrun the entire mass of them.

***

[Identification Complete]

[Name: Crazy Ant]

[Grade: F-Rank Blight-Class]

[Passive Mutation: Frenzy Instinct]

[Brief Description: The crazy ants gain incremental increases to strength, speed, and dexterity the weaker they are]

[Swarmblood Art: Mad Warband]

[Brief Description: The crazy ants can concentrate bioarcanic essence into their blood, transmuting them into tiny crazy ants that will attack nearby targets indiscriminately]

[Swarmblood Aura: ~2,000]

[Strength: ~5, Speed: ~3, Toughness: ~4, Dexterity: ~3, Perception: ~3]

***

It absolutely didn’t help that they were all crazy ants, which meant for every drop of blood he shed from them, they could summon waves of tiny golden ants with glittering bodies and vicious jaws. Said waves of tiny ants poured over the ground, washing over stone, coffin bases, fallen glass, broken bones, and whatever they washed over, they chewed and devoured and eroded in the matter of seconds. The floor was lava, so up was the only direction he could run in, for every Myrmur he ‘killed’ would only thicken the rising wave of ants beneath him.

And they’re all at least F-Rank Blight-Class, huh?

Same grade as Lorcawn was.

Only, the problem was that Lorcawn had been huge. Power aside, he’d been relatively slow and clumsy and easy to evade, but these Blight-Classes were all human-sized with the nimbleness of humans. They had the same power with the advantage of being more compact. Still, if he had to locate a weakness, it was that they were all manifested externally instead of being wrapped around their Host—he could strike, fling, smash, cut, and bludgeon them as hard as he wanted without worrying about pulverizing the unfortunate human they were enveloping.

A small mercy.

But as he continued hopping up from pillar to pillar, floor to floor, the literal sea of chittering crazy ants continued to rise beneath him. The actual Myrmurs themselves followed as well. Several climbed straight up the walls after him, claws ripping into stone. Others bounded from coffin to coffin, pouncing at him from every direction. He ducked beneath a swipe, kicked another that landed behind above him, and tackled one more that landed on the stairs above him.

It was an endless onslaught of them. They just kept coming, kept going, and all the while, fire flared above him. He threw himself up onto the next platform just as a fireball—made of a clump of tiny fire ants—struck the stairs he’d been standing on. The ant-ball burst into even more flames on impact, scattering the fire ants across the stone and burning a few Myrmurs behind him, uncaring.

A few landed on his coat and began chewing at the armored lining while burning at the same time. He slapped them off with his cane, scowling.

And while the crazy ants chase me from below, that lady’s flinging fire ants at me from up there.

Far above, the masked lady remained perched on the chandelier, wreathed in her red fire ant Blight-Class Myrmur armor. Flames crawled across her four arms and shoulders, bright against the shadows of the catacombs, and she hissed in pain as she continued lobbing clumps of fire ants down at him.

***

[Identification Complete]

[Name: Fire Ant]

[Grade: D-Rank Blight-Class]

[Passive Mutation: Fire Core]

[Brief Description: The fire ant gains incredible tolerance to heat]

[Swarmblood Art: Infernal Warband]

[Brief Description: The fire ant can concentrate bioarcanic essence into their blood, transmuting them into tiny fire ants that can ignite themselves before dissolving briefly afterwards]

[Swarmblood Aura: ~2,900]

[Strength: ~7, Speed: ~5, Toughness: ~5, Dexterity: ~4, Perception: ~4]

***

The higher I climb, the easier it’ll be for her to hit me with her fireballs, he thought, grimacing, but if I don’t go up, the crazy ants will eventually get me.

“So troublesome!” he shouted up. He sprang to another row of coffins jutting out the side of the catacombs as another volley of fireballs came down. “Hey! You! Are you really sure you don’t wanna come down and talk? I promise I won’t beat you up if you tell me what’s going on!”

“Y-You’re lying! You’re definitely gonna beat me up!”

The lady jerked her head sideways, and four more fireballs formed in her hands. Gael sighed, then kicked a Myrmur in the face as it reached him. It lost grip and tumbled down into the sea of ants, taking two more with it.

“What’s the experiment you’re all doing here?” he called, jumping onto a higher platform before another fireball could land. “Is it Host-control? Myrmur domestication? Parasitic symbiosis? Are we doing the whole ‘man masters monster’ thing? Because I’ll admit it’s pretty dramatic, but the coffins are a bit much!”

“I can’t say!”

“How about some specific details? How are you controlling your Blight-Class Myrmur? Drugs? Ritual? Surgery? Are there glyphs involved? Neural grafting? Did someone stitch the Myrmur’s instincts to your emotional responses? Hey, blink twice if it’s unethical.”

“I… I can’t say!”

She snarled and hurled another volley. Gael dropped flat against the platform. Heat washed over his back. The fireball passed above him, smashed into the far wall, and exploded into burning ants that rained down like confetti. He rolled off the edge of the platform, caught a protruding coffin, and hung there for half a second before swinging himself up onto an even higher protruding coffin.

“What’s your name? Who are you working for? Where does he come from? He built this place, right?”

“S-Stop asking! Stop asking! He’ll be mad! He’ll be so mad!”

“Who? Is it one man? Or multiple? Is this whole thing funded by Vharnish investors? Bleakhearth patrons? Church coins? Come on, lady, I’m getting mauled by ants and still making time for small talk! Meet me halfway, won’t you?”

“Shut up!”

“What’s his name?”

“No!”

“Doctor Chitterspleen?”

“No!”

“Professor Wombrot?”

“No!”

“Lord Stitch-a-bug-in-you?”

“No… what?”

More Myrmurs rushed him from three sides, cutting off his footholds. Gael let them come close enough to commit, then yanked the lever on the small horizontal canister at his waist. A hundred metal ravens immediately exploded from it, screeching and flapping and cutting everything everywhere around him. The Myrmurs recoiled for only a second, but a second was enough. He darted between them, planted one boot on a Myrmur’s shoulder, and vaulted onto an even higher platform.

“Was he the one who made you like this?” he pressed, looking up at the lady. “Did he teach you to command the Myrmur? Did he give you that little not-sick-upstairs drug? Does he keep you cold? You said you were cold! Interesting symptom, very sad! It’s great data for me, by the way!”

“Don’t talk about him!”

“Why not?”

“Be… Because he saved me!”

“By stuffing you with a fire ant?”

“He made me—

“He made you twitch on a chandelier in a basement full of coffin-bugs! Come on!”

“He made me better!” she screamed, and the flames along her living armor flared so violently the skull candles around the catacomb guttered. Gael tilted his head, clinging to the side of a pillar with his cane stabbed in it.

“Better for what?” he kept going. “Better for kidnapping? Better for dancing? Better for being cold? Better for obeying? Better for proving his experiment works? What does he call himself? Come on, if he’s got this much theatre buried under a ballroom, he definitely gave himself a stupid little title!”

“Don’t!”

“The Stitchfather?”

“Don’t make fun of him!”

“The Wombwright?”

“Stop!”

“Oh, I know! He’s—”

“The Breeder!” she shrieked. “He is the Breeder, and he’ll make all of us better, and you don’t get to laugh at him!”

Her words rang through the catacomb, and for half a second, even the Myrmurs chasing him from below seemed to still.

Then the lady’s posture changed as she saw the slow grin creeping across his face.

“... That wasn’t so hard, was it?” he said.

“You... you tricked me,” she whispered. “You… confused me with so many… so many… you—”

“I’m Gael Halloway. What’s your name?”

For another half a second, it almost looked as though the lady was going to introduce herself—but then she growled, lifting all four arms and squeezing blood through every seam in her chitin. The blood turned into writhing fire ants. The writing fire ants turned into living flames. As more and more of them clumped together, the stronger the fire, the denser the fire, and soon, Gael found himself staring up at a giant fireball the size of the chandelier.

“Die!” she screamed.

He sighed.

“Welp,” he muttered, one hand reaching over his shoulder and finding the first valve on his modified Vile Canister. “Time for the real fight, I guess.”