The Exorcist Doctor

Another three minutes passed, and the fight in the laboratory stopped belonging to Jin and Maeve.

Jin hated admitting that, even in the privacy of his own skull, but it was the truth. Just a minute ago they were beating the absolute shit out of the Breeder, but the moment the old man revealed he had more than one Myrmur in him, the tables had been turned on them.

Maeve fired.

Her umbrella snapped open just enough for the inner shaft to glow, then slammed shut as multiple toxic blood cannons roared across the laboratory. The shots tore through hanging brass arms, shattered rows of glass feeders, and struck the Breeder’s position hard enough to send half a workbench splintering into the air—but he’d already moved. One moment he wore the bulky, hard-backed shape of the shield mantis, and in the next, colorful netwing beetle wings snapped from his spine, launching him sideways through the rain of debris with a delighted laugh.

“He’s doing it again!” Maeve shouted. “Jin!”

Jin didn’t need to be told. He slammed his gauntlet into the floor and fired a rising wave of mudblood, hardening it into a wall between them and the Breeder. It rose as the Breeder’s wings flashed a bright, vicious orange, and the two of them turned their faces aside just in time to avoid the worst of it. The mudblood wall caught the scattered flare, hissed, and blistered across the surface.

The Breeder hit the wall a heartbeat later in another form: deathstalker scorpion. Black-gold chitin, heavy pincers as the two extra arms, and a segmented tail as long and thick as a full statue smashed through the mudblood wall in one blow, forcing both of them to leap back. As they did, Maeve fired another volley of toxic cannons. A few shots slammed into the Breeder’s ribs, but the power was low or the armor was thick. Either way, the Breeder only skidded back before he started laughing again.

“Fantastic!” he cried. “Let’s try the other throat again!”

Then the living scorpion armor sank into him and another one exploded out of his skin. Jin had seen the mantis, the beetle, and the scorpion—this new armor with grey, rounded chitin and translucent wings didn’t resemble any bug he’d learned about in Exorcist training instantly.

But Maeve recognized it, her eyes going wide.

“Cover your ears!” she shouted.

Jin clamped both hands over his ears as the Breeder inhaled—and then the man screamed.

The sound had weight. It had teeth. The shriek blasted through the laboratory as a visible ripple in the air, flattening loose papers, shattering what glass remained intact, and striking them hard enough to drive the breaths out of both of them. His knees hit the floor. Maeve dropped beside him, one hand still locked over her ears while the other held onto her umbrella.

Both of them had avoided being blown backwards, but even through his hands, his ears rang. His skull rang. And if his eardrums were still ringing, then Maeve, who could only protect one ear…

As the Breeder’s shrill cicada screech died, Jin staggered a few more steps back, breathing hard. His world was muffled and warped, every sound buried under a high whining pitch that made him want to claw at his own head. But Maeve was worse. Her face had gone pale, and a sick sheen clung to her eyes as she continued glaring daggers at the Breeder before them.

Her bleeding right ear aside, he immediately knew she’d already used her Art more than she should’ve. Too much more. The toxin-nullification drug Gael gave them could only cover so much, and without Gael here to drain and feed her fresh blood properly, she was running on a narrowing ledge. Jin could see it in the slight tremor of her grip. The way she took one extra heartbeat to lift her umbrella. The way her balance shifted, corrected, then shifted again.

… I have to pick up the slack.

I’m not… doing anythi—

“What’s wrong, Exorcists?” the Breeder taunted. “Losing your grip?”

The two of them snapped their heads up. In their disorientation, they hadn’t noticed the Breeder had already jumped over them, having swapped back to his scorpion armor with the giant tail raised.

Jin moved before Maeve could. He exhaled hard, slammed both boots apart, and drove a heavy flood of mudblood out of his gauntlet with an uppercut. The wave arched above them and hardened into a dome just as the scorpion tail came down—but the impact still cracked the world. Jin’s arms jolted from the feedback. The mudblood dome held, but only barely, its surface spiderwebbing under the force.

Beneath him, the floor groaned and cracked. Both he and Maeve looked down just as a split ran between them through the tiles.

“You clinic folk care about this fight staying quiet, don’t you?” The Breeder laughed above the dome. “You care about the silly little dance, but I don’t. So what if I’m discovered? I’ll just relocate, and nobody will find me unless I want them to.”

Maeve hissed. “Don’t you—”

“But you? You came here representing the Heartcord Clinic. It’ll be bad if the Vharnish folks sponsoring this show knew it was the clinic that caused a ruckus, right?”

Then the Breeder drove all his force down, and though there was a dome between him and them, the floor beneath them gave first.

All three of them plunged through the collapsing section of the laboratory. Jin braced instinctively, but the drop was too sudden and too filthy with debris to control. His shoulder clipped a beam. His back struck something hard. He crashed down through plaster and gold trim and hit the floor below back-first in a burst of shattered tile.

Music stopped—not everywhere, but here, in this hallway, the rhythm of the dance broke. Masked guests gasped, cried out, and scrambled back, their elegant formation collapsing into frightened disorder. A few still held hands out of habit, frozen mid-step while dust rained around them. Others fled towards the nearest doorway, masks turning towards the hole above as if the ceiling itself had betrayed them.

Maeve hit the ground nearby and rolled hard, coughing. Jin pushed up faster, because the Breeder had landed almost gracefully, scorpion tail already swinging.

He saw the line of attack heading for Maeve.

No you don’t!

He shoved himself forward and slammed into her side, knocking her out of the path. The tail struck him instead. He brought his gauntlet up to block, but the force still blasted through his whole arm and chest, sending him off the floor and flying through a door beside him. Wood splintered around his shoulders as he was thrown into a smaller ballroom.

Panic erupted there too.

A dozen dancing pairs broke apart in horror. Musicians on a narrow balcony stumbled over their notes, one violin letting out a dying squeal. He crashed across the polished floor, rolled through someone’s dropped wine glass, and came to a stop near a velvet-cushioned sofa, groaning in pain.

He coughed, tasted blood inside his mouth, and shoved himself onto one knee. As he did, the Breeder stepped calmly through the broken doorway while the masked patrons fled right by him, shouting in fear.

“I really am impressed,” the Breeder said. “Two Exorcist Hunters without their Hosts managing to push back multiple C-Rank Blight-Class Myrmurs is no small feat… I think? I’m pretty sure most Exorcists in Vharnveil wouldn’t have lasted half this long.”

Jin’s fingers clawed against the floor.

Get up.

If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

His body was heavy. Toxin and exhaustion crawled through his limbs. Every breath carried ache, and his right arm throbbed where the scorpion tail had rattled bone and metal together. But he rose anyway, slow and ugly, while the guests retreated farther away from the ballroom.

“In hindsight, I really should’ve ignored him and sent far more Myrmurs after the Heartcord Clinic before tonight,” the Breeder continued mumbling to himself. Then his beady shrill cicada eyes brightened, as if mimicking his actual eyes underneath the living armor. “Oh, well. It’s a correctable error. After tonight, I’ll send every last Myrmur I have in catacomb storage after your clinic. All I need is a little more time, after all, to perfect the formula. Can you imagine it? An army of Myrmurs at our beck and call. It’ll be a new age of directed warfare for the entire city! How exciting! How—”

Jin’s gauntlet clicked as he flexed his fingers, and then he clenched his fist, pushing forward with all the strength he had. The Breeder’s boasting died under the sound of his approach. The giant tail swung forward again, so he snarled and drove a punch straight into it, meeting it with a thunderous crash.

For the first time, their strength was evenly matched.

As the guests continued to flee, their battle continued across the small ballroom. The Breeder came after him in a blur of chitin. Whenever he drew too close, the scorpion tail snapped around to block him, thick and heavy enough to meet his gauntlet head-on. But whenever he broke away to create distance, the deathstalker scorpion armor would warp and fold away, replaced by netwing beetle wings glowing a poisonous orange and forcing him to turn his face away. Then the shrill cicada armor would fold in, allowing the Breeder to fire physical sound waves his way like a series of invisible metal clubs.

He threw up a mudblood wall. The shockwave cracked through it and still hit him hard enough to make his teeth clack. He spat blood onto the floor, then pushed off to the side again as the Breeder charged in with the shield mantis armor. Two scythes carved through chairs, tables, velvet dividers, and discarded masks in a flurry of arcing cuts. He dodged and evaded, firing lines of mudblood at the floor and hardening them into ridges beneath the Breeder’s feet. The Breeder stumbled just enough—he ducked under one slash and drove a gauntleted punch into the man’s ribs.

The impact landed, and the Breeder grunted, but then the mantis back-shield absorbed most of the force, allowing one scythe to snap down at him with zero recovery time.

Jin barely got his gauntlet up in time. Serrated chitin slammed against his metal and his arm buckled, but more slashes arced down at him from the left, then the right, the Breeder’s relentless slashes forcing him back step by step until his shoulders slammed into a pillar along the ballroom wall. He fired another burst from his gauntlet at an arch above them. Hardened mud snapped around it like a hook, and he yanked himself up just as the mantis scythes carved through the spot where his chest had been.

The pillar behind him split. He landed on a balcony rail and tried to catch his breath, but his body was burning hotter and hotter.The toxin-nullification drug was thinning fast. He could feel the heat behind his eyes, the pressure in his lungs—faint weakness settling in his muscles after every burst of mudblood—but he kept firing down at the Breeder anyways.

Letting the Breeder take control of the pace of battle was the alternative, and he couldn’t have that.

… How did Maeve fight through this for six minutes straight?

She was somewhere outside, probably dragging herself up, and probably still ready to fight even with one ear bleeding and her blood turning against her. She could push and push and push until her body looked like it should collapse, and still she’d bring that umbrella down on the Breeder with the strength to drill through a Blight-Class shield.

Why can she do that?

When the Breeder grabbed a table and chucked it up at him with the scorpion tail, he vaulted over the balcony rail and dropped behind a row of abandoned musician chairs. A netwing flash bloomed before him. He turned his head away, fired mudblood blindly forward, and hardened it into three crooked slabs mid-air. They caught the follow-up cicada scream and burst apart into gritty rain.

Why can she fight at full power without Gael?

He didn’t think he was that far behind her in terms of unlocked mutations. He didn’t think he was that far behind her in terms of pure physicality, either—not so far that he should feel like this—but it was like Maeve had been able to fight at full capacity even without Gael by her side, and he couldn’t. Every time he was just about to reach inside himself for the deepest, thickest reserve of mudblood, he felt himself pulling back, because…

He was worried.

He was afraid of overdosing on his toxic blood before he could finish the fight.

So how?

Why can she fight the Breeder like that when both of our bloodshackles are disconnected?

Before he knew it, he’d backed himself into the corner of the ballroom, and the Breeder was leaping at him, scorpion tail raised high. It was the same move. Jin had nowhere to go. Out of desperation, he jerked his gauntlet up and fired a wave of mudblood again, forming another dome, but his blood came out thinner than the first time.

He knew it the second he saw it harden that it wouldn’t hold this time as well, and the scorpion tail smashed through. The dome broke. So did the floor. For the second time, the world dropped out from under the two of them, and they fell through a storm of broken wood, plaster, velvet, and ruined golden trim until he crashed hard into the ground.

Jin rolled to the side, coughing, as the Breeder crashed nearby with enough force to crater the gleaming black-and-ivory floor.

Instantly, Jin knew they’d fallen into the Grand Ballroom—and the vast ballroom recoiled from them. Hundreds of dancing guests backed away in a rippling circle, dresses dragging, shoes scraping. Even the myriad groups of musicians on the balconies faltered one by one until the music died completely, leaving only gasps and quiet whispers around the entire hall.

Jin pushed himself onto one elbow, chest heaving.

Shit.

The music’s stopped

The dancing’s stopped

The show’s… gonna stop.

The thought was almost inappropriate, considering the Breeder was currently crawling out of a crater only a dozen meters away, but Gael’s warning had struck a chord in him anyways. If the Endless Masquerade were to stop, the entire ward would turn on them. The Three-Faces could bury a corpse politely, but in here, nobody could politely explain why an Exorcist and an experimental Myrmur abomination had dropped into the heart of the Grand Ballroom like an unwelcome omen.

But if there was one silver lining to this whole thing, it was that across the floor, the Breeder was struggling to stand upright too.

The man’s living scorpion armor was twitching. Warping. The chitin plates rippled along his back and tail, plates shifting out of alignment. Beneath the armor, the Breeder’s human face briefly pushed through the living mask as well, grimacing with fury and strain.

“Saintess,” the Breeder muttered. “My time’s also up?”

Jin narrowed his eyes.

His formula isn’t perfect.

He can’t… control his Myrmurs forever?

It was an opportunity to strike back, so Jin forced one foot under himself, gritting his teeth, pushing himself up. If he could just take the Breeder down here, nothing else would matter. Even if he collapsed afterwards, it’d all be worth it. Even if the Heartcord Clinic had to suffer the aftermath of his battle, it’d all be worth it. His battle would end. His father would be avenged if he. Just. Moved.

But he took one step forward, and his balance vanished. The ballroom tilted sharply beneath him, and he staggered forward, gauntlet scraping the floor to keep him from falling flat on his face.

For a second, he didn’t understand it.

Then the heat behind his eyes spiked, his lungs seized, and his fingers went numb inside his gauntlet.

Oh.

So this is what overdosing on toxic blood’s like.

The Breeder saw it too. With Jin’s falter, the old man’s scorpion armor steadied just enough, allowing him to twist his entire body and send his giant tail at Jin’s face.

Time stretched thin.

Jin saw the tail coming. He saw the pointed stinger, black and gold and wet with toxins. He saw the guests frozen around him. He saw the mechanical moth chandelier hanging overhead, its wings still fluttering as if serenading his impending death.

And he couldn’t move.

His body wouldn’t answer him.

… Is this it?

His jaw tightened, but his legs still refused. The stinger came closer, closer, and closer, and just as he was about to bite his tongue off if it meant he could take one small step to the left—

Someone grabbed his hand and yanked him two steps to the right.

His body lurched out of the tail’s path. The stinger tore past his cheek close enough for the wind of it to scrape his mask, but before he could blink, the hand that’d grabbed him pulled him into a turn, guiding him through a dance-step so sharp that—for one dizzy second—his body obeyed the old Vharnish lessons.

He felt his bloodshackle reconnecting with someone else’s, and the toxic heat began draining from him immediately.

It was Vivienne.

She looked like she’d run through half the building and all of hell to reach him. Her gold-and-white dress was rumpled, one sleeve torn, hair slipping loose from its pins, and sweat shone along her face. Her breathing came too fast. Fear was written plainly across her eyes—the kind she always tried and failed to hide—but she didn’t let go of his hands.

She gritted her teeth, looked straight at him, and forced a grin so stiff it looked like she’d stolen it from someone braver.

“I’m here!” she said, voice shaky. “The show’s not over yet!”

For half a second, Jin could only stare at her.

Then the Grand Ballroom erupted with new music—one he was very familiar with.