The Exorcist Doctor

Vivi screamed the whole way down. Even House Thornebed’s etiquette tutors couldn’t polish this much terror into respectability, so she squeezed Jin’s waist with both arms as they fell.

The Grand Ballroom vanished above them. Along with it, the music, the dancing, and the fluttering mothlight faded as well. Then they started plunging through the catacombs, down past layers of skull candles, stacked coffins, jutting stone walkways, and colossal pillars carved with old mourning faces. She briefly saw the Breeder fallin a short distance away—his living Myrmur armors still trying to peel themselves off his skin—but she also saw the floor very, very far below.

That got her attention more than the Breeder.

Oh, Saintess, I’m going to die.

She didn’t have her wing mutation unlocked yet. She didn’t have a gliding mutation unlocked either. A fall like this was going to—

“Hold on!” Jin shouted.

“I am holding on!” she shrieked back.

He fired a wave of mudblood beneath them, which spread wide as they fell. Again and again he fired, forming layer after layer of softening sludge, and she watched as the first sheet splattered against the floor and thickened. The next piled over it. Another bloomed across the surface and washed out, turning the hard stone below into a dark, trembling cushion that looked more beautiful than any pillow she’d ever seen in her life.

So they hit the ground hard, and the impact still knocked the breath out of her, but instead of turning into paste against stone, they sank into the mudblood cushion with a wet squelch instead.

Her whole body jarred, and her teeth clacked together as she rolled off the cushion, coughing. Jin landed worse than she did, but only because he’d angled his body slightly beneath hers before impact.

Of course he did.

She didn’t know if he’d meant to protect her or if it was merely instinct, but the possibility of either made her chest tighten.

It’s not over yet.

Get… up.

Across the atrium, the Breeder crashed with far less grace. He struck hard stone a dozen steps away, bounced once, then rolled into a half-broken pillar. His living armor twitched and warped over his body, cicada throat sacs warbling like hatching eggs as different colored chitin plates fought to manifest over his body. His head was fully exposed at this point—none of the four Myrmurs at his disposal could decide which one of them should cover his face.

Somehow, Vivi managed to claw to her feet faster than Jin, but not faster than the Breeder.

“... Hah,” the old man rasped, glaring daggers at Jin. “Exorcist boy. You remember what I said about siccing my Myrmurs on the Heartcord Clinic?”

Jin’s gauntlet flexed weakly as he hauled himself up. “Shut… the fuck up.”

“Well, they’re all stored here!” the Breeder continued, spreading both arms as his armor tried and failed to settle around him. “Wake up, my children! Slaughter the two Exorcists and trace their blood back to their source!”

His voice echoed through the catacomb.

… And absolutely nothing answered him.

The Breeder blinked. Vivi looked around slowly, her heart thudding hard enough to hurt. She remembered this place filled with screeches, chitin, and a small army of Blight-Class Myrmurs manifesting out of glass coffins filled with slumbering Hosts. Gael had told her to run and leave him behind, but now…

The catacomb floor was littered with twitching bodies she hadn’t noticed before.

Ant-type Myrmurs lay everywhere, piled across steps, coffin rows, broken platforms, and the stone walkways above her like carcasses after a massacre. Their legs were shattered. All of them. Some tried to crawl with their broken limbs dragging behind them, but their bodies spasmed with sickly weakness, and while all of them were still attached to their sleeping Hosts by their umbilical cords, none of them seemed to be able to recoil back into them. Their chitin pulsed, warbled, and failed to regenerate properly, as if something had poisoned the very idea of recovery out of them.

Vivi’s mouth went dry.

What… happened down here?

The Breeder stared around with the same question written across his face.

“What happened here?” he muttered. “Who—”

“The fuck are you?”

The Breeder whirled—and Gael sucker-punched the Breeder across the face, sending the old man sideways and smashing into the catacomb wall. Stone broke and a small cloud of dust rained down from above.

While the Breeder’s living armor shrieked in pain, chitin peeling and snapping off, blood-soaked Gael adjusted his top hat with one bloody knuckle and looked at Vivi squarely.

“No, really. Who’s this guy?”

Vivi stared at him. Her throat was too tight for her to say anything at first.

“You…” she eventually mumbled. “But how did you… I thought you… weren’t you—”

“This is the Vile Canister, prototype two, made with those milkweed bug cores,” Gael said, giving both her and Jin a delighted look as he thumbed over his shoulder, gesturing at the massive pipe-like tank strapped to his back. “It does everything my old Vile Canister does—you know, absorbing toxin, storing it, and spewing it back out as toxic mist whenever I need it—but prototype two has thirty-three distinct tubes and syringes stabbed into my back, which allows it to convert stored toxin into a physical stimulant that temporarily boosts all my attribute levels by two.” Then he spread his arms, motioning at the twitching Myrmurs around them. “Which, as it turns out, is just enough for me to beat the shit out of every ant in this catacomb… though I did use up all my metal ravens, exhaust my hungry flowers, and burn through every last drop of stored toxin gas. Oh well. What can you do?”

Then his grin faltered. His knees dipped, and he caught himself on his cane with a hard exhale, shoulders sagging as if his bones suddenly couldn’t carry his own weight. Vivi and Jin both lurched toward him, but he waved them off with a lazy hand.

“I’m fine, I’m fine. Mostly fine. Fine adjacent,” he muttered, before tilting his head back. “That fire ant lady was a right vicious chandelier goblin, though. She was tougher than the rest, so I had to try just a little bit harder to take her down.”

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Vivi turned to look, and immediately recognized the masked lady she and Gael had chased down here. The masked lady was lying flat on the ground as well, unconscious with her living Myrmur armor completely peeled off her body and twitching uselessly beside her.

Saintess.

So Gael… beat everyone here by himself?

But before she could keep staring at Gael in awe and shock, the Breeder began to stand again—and the far ceiling above them broke open one more time in a fresh rain of dust and music.

Both Vivi and Jin whipped their heads up. Maeve descended first, umbrella opened above her as she dropped down at just a slow enough speed that she wouldn’t break her legs upon touching the ground. Above her, Fergal hopped down from one platform to the next with Cara on his back, not at all worried he’d slip and take the long fall. Then above the two of them, Evelyn fluttered down with her giant translucent wings, carrying Liorin under both arms like he was a heavy sack of slag she could haul over her shoulders.

Maeve landed softly as the Breeder charged at Jin and Vivi in one last desperate attempt to do some damage, but she didn’t even waste a word. She kicked her ankle out, and the dull bloodshackle shot towards Gael’s ankle, immediately lighting up green as his blood poured into hers.

Gael jolted upright.

“Oh, that feels super weird,” he said, eyes widening. Then he grinned at Maeve. “Well. Have at it, dearest wife.”

Vivi saw the change instantly. Maeve’s posture steadied. Her shoulders lifted. The tremor vanished from her grip. She dashed past Gael, Jin, and Vivi, meeting the Breeder halfway through his dash with her umbrella already spinning—and then her first stab cracked into the old man’s chest hard enough to fold him. The second swipe slammed into his jam. The third hammered his shoulder, then his knees, then his ribs in a flurry so fast Vivi could barely follow it.

The Breeder tried to shift forms. Maeve didn’t let him. Her umbrella struck again and again, each blow driving him farther back until she spun once, planted both feet, and smashed him across the catacomb floor. He flew into the same broken wall Gael had punched him into and crumpled fully this time, coughing blood into the dust.

And as everyone surrounded the Breeder slowly, scowling at the fallen old man, Vivi looked back at Jin on the ground and swallowed.

She offered him her hand.

For a second, Jin only stared at it. Her heart thumped in that awful silence as she suddenly felt foolish. Too eager. Too obvious. It was almost like she was telling him she was an upper-city girl who’d chased him all the way down to Bharncair and still didn’t know where to put her hands when it mattered.

But he surprised her when he took her hand, and her heart skipped another beat.

“Help me up,” he grumbled.

“Huh?”

He scowled up at her.

“Oh,” she mumbled. “Uh… okay.”

She pulled him up, and it was easier said than done. As both of them got back on their feet fully, though, Gael had already stepped ahead of the rest of them, twirling his cane casually.

“Well, well, well. Look what we have here. The most stereotypical mad doctor in every horror chronicle ever written,” he said, grinning as he stopped before the Breeder’s twitching body. “Granted, I also look like I prescribe nightmares recreationally, so maybe I shouldn’t be saying that.”

Maeve sighed. “Gael.”

“What? Self-awareness is the first step to not being boring.” Then he crouched slightly, smiling down at the old man. “You must be the ‘Breeder’. A little fire ant goblin behind me told me your name while attempting to turn me into a roasted raven.”

The Breeder’s lips curled as he looked up at Gael, eyes dark. “Should’ve sewn her lips shut when I had the chance.”

“You should’ve. So, let’s skip the dramatic interrogation preface: are you the man running this whole operation? Surely not, right? You’ve got the hands of a back-alley butcher and the ego of a cathedral organist, but this whole place is too big for one wrinkly little bug enthusiast. Who are you working for? What’s your goal? Why artificial Myrmur Hosts? Why Host-controlled Myrmurs? Hey, how did you hide this many coffins under the Endless Masquerade without one rich bastard tripping into the murder stairs?”

The Breeder laughed. It came out wet and ugly, but it was laughter all the same. Gael’s grin thinned slightly.

“Oh, you’re laughing,” Gael drawled. “That means either I said something funny, or you’re about to be extremely annoying.”

“No, no,” the Breeder rasped. “You just talk so much. You’re a chatterbox—just like him.”

The catacomb suddenly went cold.

Vivi felt it before she understood it. The damp air sharpened against her skin, and the little hairs along her arms rose beneath her torn sleeve. Around the catacomb, skull-candles began gutting out one by one. A brazier on the upper walkway coughed black smoke and died. Then another. Then another. Shadows thickened between coffin alcoves, crawling wider with each extinguished flame.

Then thin streams of red mist curled between the cracks in the walls, drifting slowly down to the floor.

Wherever the mist passed, tiny flowers began to grow. Buds burst from the cracks in the stone, then stretched into long stalks with waxy black leaves and petals colored in bruised violet, rotten gold, and deep arterial red. As far as Vivi could tell, they were all exotic flowers. Dozens and hundreds and thousands of flowers started blooming across every surface around the catacomb, spreading so quickly they almost resembled a fungal infection

And before anyone could say anything, a shadow dropped from the ceiling and landed before the Breeder without a sound.

Everyone backed off at once, weapons out, but Vivi didn’t have her rifle with her, so all she could do was freeze.

… A Raven?

If she squinted, she’d almost say he was Gael. He had the top hat, the long black coat, the cane in one hand, and the Raven’s mask—but the details were wrong. Umbilical cord-like strips of black leather trailed from his sleeves and the tail of his coat, swaying faintly in the red mist. His mask wasn’t black leather like Gael’s, either, but some sort of silver crystal that covered his entire face.

The mask’s lenses were red as well, in sharp contrast to Gael’s green, but Vivi saw the eyes behind them.

Cold.

And incontrovertibly dead.

But while Vivi shivered, the Breeder looked up at the Raven and smiled weakly.

“I told you,” he said. “We should’ve dealt with the clinic before it came to this.”

The Raven said nothing.

He only turned his head—red lenses settling on Gael for one brief second—before he bent down, hauled the Breeder onto his shoulder, and started walking away.

“You’re not leaving!” Cara snapped. Everyone else fight-capable also cracked their knuckles. “Drop the man and—”

The Raven snapped his fingers, and every exotic flower that’d grown above two meters around them attacked. The nearest bloom lunged at Cara with a petal-jaw wide enough to bite her in half. She brought her arms up, but Fergal dashed in and let the flower’s petals clamp down on his spider arms with a wet crack instead. The rest of the giant hungry flowers swarmed in as well, biting and snarling and forcing everyone except for Vivi to dodge, block, and jump—and all the while, the Raven walked towards the unconscious masked lady at the back of the catacombs, picking her up as well.

It was all Vivi could do to cower behind Jin as she watched the Raven walk directly up the wall, reach the fourth floor, and vanish through a large crack that hadn’t been there a minute ago.

After five more minutes, the catacomb finally returned into a battered silence. The giant hungry flowers were all dealt with—and by dealt with, it meant Liorin made physical contact with most of them to turn them metallic and put them under his control—but by then, it was already too late. The Breeder was gone. The masked lady was gone. The Raven, too, was gone.

There was nothing left for them to do but to check on each other quietly. Evelyn and Liorin helped dust each other off, Fergal fussed over Cara for injuries she hadn’t sustained, Jin collapsed beside Vivi because he was still deathly tired, but Vivi herself didn’t collapse. For all the running and dancing around she’d been doing, she still had the stamina left to stand—and to look at Gael and Maeve, who hadn’t moved an inch the moment that Raven had dropped in unannounced.

Both of them stared up at the crack in the wall.

Maeve’s eyes were cold.

Gael’s mouth hung half-open.

“... It’s you,” Maeve whispered.

“Dad?” Gael whispered.