The Exorcist Doctor

Six months had passed after the incident in the Endless Masqueradel, and Gael was starting to suffer from an ailment no medicine could ever truly be able to cure.

Peace.

It wasn’t real peace, obviously. This was Bharncair. If the city ever became truly peaceful, the towers would probably start screaming from withdrawal, the gutters would unionize, and every corpse in Fellstar Cemetery would sit up to file complaints about the lack of ambience. But compared to the old daily rhythm of Myrmurs, infections, collapsing lungs, screaming Hosts, cursed wounds, gang disputes, aristocratic vandalism, and whatever the teens dragged in from the Fogspire Forest with the proud look of someone presenting a dead rat, the past half-year had been peaceful.

In the longer aftermath of the Endless Masquerade battle, the Heartcord Clinic had finished treating every kidnapped person who’d been turned into an artificial Myrmur Host. Not all of them recovered easily, and not all of them recovered prettily, but recovered they did. Afterwards, the laboratory in the Grand Ball had been stripped of every useful note, paper, surgical tool, half-burned journal, hidden ledger, and preserved Myrmur sample that Gael could get out of the wreckage—then the Three-Faces finally demolished the place properly. The catacombs beneath it were sealed with cement, and then quietly denied by every wealthy patron who’d ever heard of them. Bless the bribes.

With the destruction of the Breeder’s lab meant the artificial Myrmur host production had been completely shut down. For six months straight, there hadn’t been a single new report of a Myrmur Host exploding across Bharncair… and that meant there’d also been no new leads on where the Breeder and the red-lensed Raven might’ve run off to.

Still, the city hadn’t been sleeping while they all waited for something to happen. With the Heartcord Clinic now backed by the Saint’s Hands of Blightmarch, the Steelborn of Ironwych, and the Three-Faces of Bleakhearth, medicine now moved through three of the four cardinal wards with a steadier rhythm than ever. Crates of illicit drugs and medicine went east and west every month, while symbiote elixirs followed under heavier guard. As a result, total reports of Myrmur appearances had plummeted across all three wards. Bleakhearth’s reports were a bit more dubious since the Three-Faces weren’t so open about their numbers, but the Saint’s Hands reported a mass number of Exorcists departing from Bleakhearth to return to Vharnveil—likely because there just weren’t enough Myrmurs in Bleakhearth for them to exorcize and make a living off of.

Gael had promised Vivi he was going to put the Exorcists out of a job, after all.

As for Ironwych, the Steelborn were strict enough about public cleanliness and infection control that their Myrmur appearances were few and far between as well. Any Myrmur Hosts that did pop up—and any they couldn’t cure themselves with their regular elixir shipments—were swiftly sent down to Blightmarch for direct treatment, so it could be said that Blightmarch itself, of all three cardinal wards, had prospered the most.

Blightmarch had also changed the most.

It’d been over half a year since the Saint’s Hands struck their deal with the Steelborn, and with Gael keeping his end of the bargain to deliver his medicine east, Calvos also kept his end of the deal. It was two months ago that Ironwych finally began sending working gloam lanterns back to the south. Working. Gloam. Lanterns. According to Calvos, finding moonflowers atop the Grand Ironwych Mountains had been a little bit more than ‘difficult’, but the Steelborn found them nevertheless and began cultivating them in mass.

As their business contract swore in ink, Ironwych was allowed to keep eighty percent of their manufactured gloam lanterns for their own installation, but Blightmarch would be sent the remaining twenty percent. And twenty percent, as it turned out, was still more than enough to make the Saint’s Hands run around like a gang of possessed lamplighters.

For the past two months, the Saint’s Hands had been installing gloam lanterns adjacent to ordinary street lamps in the highest-traffic parts of Blightmarch. That was the Black Bloom Bazaar, where thousands passed through daily under awnings of strange plants and stranger debts; the Fellstar Cemetery, where the wealthiest men in the ward went to discuss investments; the mouth of the Wild Bridge, where foreigners crossed in and out with luggage, fear, and terrible shoes; the fences around the Fogspire Forest, where children played too close to danger no matter how many adults shouted; the Patchwork Tenements, where the Saint’s Hands had remade the old Repossessor Bazaar into their headquarters; and of course, the forestry neighborhood surrounding the Heartcord Clinic.

In order to stop their pale white glow from blinding every passerby, they had to dial down the gloam lanterns they installed along the streets. Now they blended in just enough to not ruin Blightmarch’s usual charming orange lights. But even weakened, the gloam lanterns worked. Any weak Myrmur would burn away inside people’s bodies as long as they passed under the orange-and-white lights, and while the pale white lights weren’t a perfect cure for more serious ailments, the statistics were speaking for themselves. Since last month, forty-two percent fewer patients came to the clinic because of common ailments like fog-cold, gutter-throat, and lantern rash. Thirty-one percent fewer came in with worsened cases like lungrot, weeping fever, and black-vein chills. Who could’ve guessed that stopping little illnesses before neglect turned them into big illnesses would improve public health?

And they weren’t done yet. The Saint’s Hands were still in the process of installing more gloam lanterns in the less-travelled parts of the ward. Their tentative objective was to eventually have the entire ward covered in pale white light, and ideally achieved within the next ten years, so there was still lots of work to do.

… Though having less people coming into the clinicmeant Gael also had less to do, so right here, right now—in the middle of a clear-aired afternoon—he found himself standing in a training courtyard in the Patchwork Tenements, sparring with Vivi while a dozen Saint’s Hands rested and watched from the side.

But by ‘sparring’ with Vivi, he mostly meant it was a one-sided beatdown on his part.

To Vivi’s credit, she no longer flinched every time his cane came whistling towards her face. That was progress. Six months ago, she would’ve cried, gasped, apologized to the incoming weapon, and then still allowed it to rearrange her dignity across the ground. Now, dressed in a compact battle dress similar to the one Maeve wore—fitted fabric, reinforced seams, and enough mobility to keep her from tripping—she actually remembered to bring her rifle up like a shield, using it to block as many swings from him as she could.

That wasn’t saying much, considering he never went easy on her and always started with a flurry of wild slashes from beginning to end.

“What’s… the time?” she wheezed, gritting her teeth and shifting her footing as she blocked another flurry of slashes. Sweat already clung to her brow, and the rifle in her hands trembled, but not badly. He slashed again. She blocked again. He stepped left, feinted high, then brought the cane low enough to threaten her ribs. She twisted her rifle down just in time, catching the cane along her reinforced barrel, but the force still knocked her back two stumbling steps.

“I dunno,” he said plainly. “Does it matter?”

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

Vivi inhaled through her teeth and pushed forward, trying to bash his cane aside with the rifle’s stock. It was a good attempt. Too stiff, but still good. He let her weapon pass, stepped inside her guard, and flicked his cane towards her shoulder. She barely caught it. His next slash came from the opposite side. She caught that too, but only by overextending.

There.

Gael twisted his wrist, hooked the cane beneath her rifle’s frame, and yanked.

Vivi’s balance faltered. She tried to recover—which was also progress, since six-month-ago her would just let herself fall—but he slid one boot behind hers and struck her defending rifle one final time with a hard, clean slash. The impact jolted through her arms. She yelped, lost her footing, and landed on her ass in the dirt with all the grace of a noble swan falling out of a laundry chute.

A few Saint’s Hands clapped, but Vivi stared up at him, cheeks flushed and breathing hard.

“... Well,” he said, grinning down at her and offering her a hand. “You did do better this time.”

Her eyes immediately brightened. “How long did I last?”

“Forty-four seconds. That’s three seconds longer than two weeks ago.”

Vivi looked absurdly pleased as she took his hand, letting him haul her upright. Her knees wobbled for half a second, but she steadied herself before he could make a joke.

Together, they walked off to the side of the courtyard while the waiting Saint’s Hands moved back in, pairing off with wooden blades, knives, canes, and practice claws. While Gael dropped onto the curb along the courtyard’s side with a groan, Vivi sat beside him, laying her rifle across her lap like a very ornate walking stick. The courtyard quickly filled with the sounds of strikes, grunts, and curses after taking padded clubs to the heads—all mandatory training, of course. Fergal demanded it. All respectable gangsters had to train so they could at least beat down Wretch-Class Myrmurs if it ever came down to it, and while there weren’t nearly as many Myrmurs going around today as before, it was never a bad thing to say ‘just in case’.

He pulled a 92% flask from inside his coat and drank.

Nowadays, there was so much work for everyone that he could go entire weeks without seeing some of his ‘employees’, but if there was one thing he did notice, it was that Vivi and Jin were now on slightly better terms. Jin was still a brick wall with a lot of grief and a very powerful gauntlet, and Vivi was still a sheltered little upper-city lady trying to become useful without understanding how useful violence could be, but whenever Gael caught sight of them these days—whether they were training on the clinic’s roof, exorcising minor Myrmurs, or eating dinner across from each other at Miss Alba’s many noodle shops—the air between them no longer seemed quite as poisonous as before.

They were less like two strangers chained by duty, and more like two idiots pretending not to understand their proximity. He was still fairly sure Jin didn’t know Vivi’s full backstory, but… well. Whatever. He took another long chug of his flask. His end of the deal was only to spar with Vivi every so often to make her stronger, and on that note—

Bang!

A gunshot cracked right beside him. The bullet flew across the courtyard, struck a small mirror hanging on a lamp pole, ricocheted cleanly, and flew back to pierce a hole in his flask.

Gael blinked at the alcohol pouring out of his hand.

Then he blinked at Vivi, who lowered her rifle, worked the chamber, and reloaded calmly.

“Don’t drink after exercising,” she muttered. “It’s unhealthy. And unattractive.”

“... What’s the matter with you?” Gael grumbled under his breath, tossing his flask away. “Also, with aim like that, why do you even bother with close-quarter combat? Just shoot everyone you wanna shoot from ten blocks away and four corners around.”

Vivi shook her head. “Shooting’s important, but sparring with you helps me develop my stamina and reaction speed. I can feel myself getting better day by day. It’s… actually pretty fun to train, isn’t it?”

“Eh. I’m not really getting better from sparring with you, though—”

“More importantly, what’s the matter with you?” she said, changing the subject harshly. “You’ve been hanging out with me more than Maeve recently. Why? What happened?”

Gael kept his eyes on two Saint’s Hands trading strikes. One of them overcommitted and took a knee to the stomach, making him want to wince in the man’s stead.

But Vivi kept looking at him for an answer, and… well, he didn’t really want to say anything.

He could just open his mouth and tell her the truth: that the red-lensed Raven was his birth dad, and that his dad—who he thought had died years ago—had apparently been helping the Breeder, experimenting on artificial Myrmur Hosts, and basically doing everythingthe Heartcord Clinic stood against. It wasn’t like it would even be a particularly special story. Everyone in Bharncair had a little dirt in their family history.

But still his tongue stayed heavy.

He hadn’t told anyone properly. Not Cara. Not Fergal. Not Jin. Definitely not Evelyn and Liorin. Not even Maeve, really, though there was another reason why he didn’t feel like talking to Maeve about it.

Maybe it wasn’t important for the others to know. Whether or not the red-lensed Raven was his dad didn’t change the fact that the Heartcord Clinic was on a one-way warpath to wiping out all Myrmurs in Bharncair. If his dad would stand in his way, then he’d just take him down like every other obstacle, no problem.

… He didn’t say that to Vivi, though.

Her end of the deal was that she’d give him guidance on any lady-related trouble he had, which meant she obviously knew something was wrong, but this had nothing to do with Maeve. His dad was his problem to deal with.

So before she could poke and prod him, he stood up and stretched loudly.

“Alright, alright, al…right,” he wheezed, cracking every joint in his body. “That’s enough rest. Let’s spar again. This time, you’ll use your rifle properly, and I’ll use the rest of my bioarcanic equipment arsenal—”

A raven suddenly cawed above them.

“Message! Message! Message!” it screamed. “I have a message from big boss one and big boss two!”

Gael stopped stretching and looked up. Vivi looked up as well, squinting against the pale-green sun. The courtyard fell into a brief lull as even the Saint’s Hands noticed the lone raven descending in a flurry of glossy black feathers and extremely awful attitude, but the raven didn’t care. It swooped down, circled Gael’s head twice, and cawed directly into his ear.

“Message! Message! Messa—”

“Personal space, Balthazar,” Gael said, clicking his tongue and grabbing the raven by the throat. Balthazar started trying to claw his face with its talons, but he held it just far away enough for him to grin without having to worry.

“Um…” Vivi looked between him and the raven anxiously. “What’s… this?”

“Delivering a message.”

“And why’s a wild raven delivering you a message?”

“Because apparently, Fergal and Evelyn finally finished training a bunch of them to deliver messages for the Saint’s Hands a week ago. Don’t ask me how they did it. I’ve got no idea.”

Balthazar cawed once more and wiggled its extended leg. “Read, you stupid fuck! Read it! The message! Message! Message—”

Gael slapped the raven, then untied the small note bound to its leg. While Balthazar stared at him, completely stunned, he unfolded the note and read the hastily scribbled words.

Vivi rose from the curb and walked over, rifle still in hand. “What does it say?”

Gael read the note once.

Then again.

Then again.

After the third read, he crushed the note in his fist and flung Balthazar away, letting it flail and flap away while cursing him at full volume.

“... It’s from Fergal. He wants us all to gather in the clinic,” he said, looking at Vivi before jerking his head away from the courtyard. “We’ve got a new lead.”