The Exorcist Doctor

For a few moments after the salt-hatted Fisherman spoke, Gael simply stood there beneath the second-floor gallery while the entire Drowned Parish continued roaring around him.

The answer of ‘no’ itself wasn't what surprised him, he supposed. It was how sincere it sounded. The Fisherman hadn’t mocked him, threatened him, or negotiated for better terms. It was as though the man really just thought his request was a hassle, and so—without another thought—the Fisherman returned his attention entirely to the fishing rod in his hands.

Unfortunately, whatever lurked beneath the canal was quickly becoming the center of attention for everybody else as well. The feel of the oncoming catch was spread through the market with astonishing speed. Fishmongers abandoned their stalls, gamblers hurried over carrying cups full of betting slips, and entire groups of dockworkers stopped hauling cargo just to crowd around their section of the canal. Hundreds of spectators packed themselves along the canal banks and upper galleries while chanting for the Fisherman to drag up whatever had taken his hook.

And the Fisherman had something massive on his hook, because his rod was bending alarmingly so.

“... But why not?” Gael pressed on, grinning up at the Fisherman. “Honestly. You’re everywhere in Wraithpier. The Three-Faces have to worry about appearances, and the Steelborn have to worry about their factories, but you lot don’t worry about anything—if you want something badly enough, you’ll kick down every door in the ward until you find it, I’m sure. Work with us, and we’ll probably nab the Breeder in like five or six days.”

The crowd started chanting around them as the line vibrated in the Fisherman’s hand, but the man himself actually seemed slightly in thought, until—quite suddenly—he shrugged and grunted again.

“Five days?” he mumbled. “Ah, fuck that. Five day’s a long time. Sounds like a hassle t’me.”

“Forget the business arrangement if that’s too annoying, then.” Gael tried another angle. “The Breeder’s kidnapping people from your ward. He’st turning them into artificial Myrmur Hosts. He’s taking your locals and turning them into monsters. Don’t that sound horrible to you? Don’t you wanna stomp his head into the ground for disrespecting you lot?”

The Fisherman finally looked down again. His face remained hidden beneath the massive brim of his salt-brimmed hat, and for several moments, he simply stood there thinking while the crowd roared around him.

Then he shrugged.

“Not really.”

His answer was so casual that even Maeve blinked.

“... What do you mean, not really?” Gael scowled.

“Means I don't really care.”

Before Gael could respond, something moved beneath the canal behind him. Even Maeve dashed to the side out of instinct as the water bulged up, and a second later, an enormous shape erupted from the depths in a spray of blue mist and canal stink.

Gael’s vision pulsed red before he craned his head back to look at it.

The creature looked like a gigantic lobster that’d spent far too long mutating beneath Wraithpier. Tumorous flesh bulged between cracked sections of its shell, and more than ten chitinous legs protruded from the length of its body. Thick strands of pinkish-purple tissue also wrapped around its frame like ropes, as though it needed them to keep it from falling apart, and the only reason why it needed to keep itself from falling apart in that volatile lobster form was because it needed to keep something inside.

It was a Blight-Class Myrmur, and there was a Host inside.

The fishing hook had somehow lodged itself through the lobster's mouth, and before anybody could react, the salt-hatted Fisherman yanked his rod back, reeling the entire abomination up towards the second-floor gallery without giving Gael a chance to steal his kill. The crowd loved every second of it. Cheers shook the market, coins exchanged hands, and spectators climbed onto crates and tables for a better view. Nobody seemed remotely alarmed that a giant Myrmur had just emerged from the canal, but maybe they didn’t realize. It wasn’t always easy to tell after all.

But as the giant lobster soared to the second-floor gallery, the Fisherman simply stepped forward and grabbed it by its neck—sending a jolt rippling through the entire Myrmur—befor shoving his other arm directly down its throat.

The crowd erupted with excitement as flesh tore, slime sprayed everywhere, and finally, the Fisherman yanked a full human being out of the lobster. The disgruntled, spasming man emerged tangled in blood and flesh and black tissue. A thick umbilical cord still connected the man’s spine to the lobster the Fisherman then immediately let go of, letting it drop to ground floor with a weak thud.

Both Host and Myrmur thrashed together as poisonous blood splattered across the Fisherman’s clothes. Smoke rose where the blood landed, but the Fisherman either didn’t notice or didn’t care. All he had eyes for was the Host he held in a chokehold, his hand like a vise that gradually closed around the man’s neck.

“... Oh, what the fuck?” Gael muttered. Then he stepped forward and grinned up at the Fisherman, raising his voice. “That’s some arm strength you’ve got there. Now hold off on anything drastic and just wait. I can get the Myrmur heart out of him. It’ll only take two minutes tops to—”

Before he could even climb the twitching Myrmur lobster’s body to get up onto the second floor, though, the Fisherman snapped the Host’s neck, and the crack was so loud it echoed through the market.

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

Gael paused as the Host went limp, and so did the giant, twitching lobster before him.

Then the Fisherman casually tossed the corpse back. The body dropped into the canal behind Gael, and mere seconds after he did that, the bomb buried inside the body detonated. Water exploded up, the blast drenching spectators throughout the area.

The silence lasted only two more seconds before the crowd resumed cheering. Dozens of locals immediately rushed towards the dead lobster with ridiculously long knives, hooks, and ropes. Within two more seconds, they were already hauling pieces of the Myrmur away to be butchered somewhere deeper and out of sight.

And above them all, the salt-hatted Fisherman turned back toward the other Fishermen with a middle finger.”

“Told yeh bastards I'd win.”

The others immediately erupted into argument.

“Tha' don't count,” the eel-hatted man snapped.

“Absolute robbery,” the net and hook-hatted man agreed.

“Mine would've been bigger,” the anglerfish-hatted man said.

“That guy interrupted our catches. Cheatin' bastard,” the jellyfish-hatted man grumbled. “If yeh woulda let us hook new bait and startohver from scratch, we woulda—”

“Now, why the hell did you do that?” Gael interrupted loudly, scowling up at the salt-hatted Fisherman.

The Fishermen all stopped their arguing to look down at him. In response, he raised his cane and jabbed it back at the canal.

“If you’d waited a few more seconds, I would’ve saved him, and you still would’ve gotten your catch,” he said coldly. “What was that for? What’s the point in killing him when I’m right here?”

The salt-hatted Fisherman leaned against the railing and shrugged. “Well... it is what it is, innit?”

“The fuck does that mean?”

“Um…” The Fisherman looked back at his friends, then back at Gael with another shrug. “I dunno, actually. That’s just what anyone says. But everyone here spends their whole life takin’ from th’sea. Sooner or later, someone’s gonna haveta give somethin’ back. Maybe they get eaten. Maybe they drown. Maybe they get touched in th’head by a Myrmur an’ start think’ they’re a fish. S’just how things go, eh? It’s called… what? Karma or somethin’?”

The other Fishermen nodded behind him as though this were profound wisdom.

“Save one life, don't save one life. Sea don't care,” the eel-hatted man said.

“It’s just like… th’cycle of life, or whatcha call it,” the net and hook-hatted man said.

“Also, like, Murmurs put up real good fights. Mutations make ‘em heavier. Makes ‘em harder t’reel in,” the anglerfish-hatted man said.

“If some fella’s makin’ more of ‘em, then great. We’ll catch ‘em all, too, and in Wraithpier, it ain’t a proper catch unless ye kill ‘em at the end,” the jellyfish-hatted man said.

Then they all started laughing, pulling bottles of alcohol out of their asses and celebrating the salt-hatted Fisherman’s catch. Around the market, nobody seemed concerned or disturbed by what’d just happened anymore, either. Everyone went back to their normal day-to-day, so—still staring up at the Fishermen—Gael slowly arrived at the same conclusion he’d been drifting towards ever since he entered Wraithpier.

… Nope.

They’re too off their rockers to negotiate with.

He sighed, turning away from the Fishermen and heading back to his gang. They were all looking at him as he returned—waiting for him to say something—so he gave them all the only answer he could give.

“We’re giving up on the Fishermen,” he said plainly, walking past them and beckoning them to follow him out of the Drowned Parish. “There’s not gonna be any reasoning with them. They just don’t see people being kidnapped and turned into Myrmur Hosts as a pressing problem they need to deal with, like the Steelborn and the Three-Faces, so since our strongest leverage is our ability to solve that problem, we won’t be able to convince them as we are now. All they wanna do is kill what they wanna catch, and that includes the Hosts.”

Maeve caught up beside him quickly, and so did the others.

“Then… what are we going to do?” she said. “If the Fishermen won’t help without killing the Hosts as part of their sport, where do we start looking for the Breeder ourselves?”

Gael glanced back at where the giant lobster had hit the ground. “Well, our dear fish-hatted maniacs did show us something interesting, at least. It seems most Myrmurs here—if not all of them—take the form of giant fish and crustaceans, since Myrmurs tend to take the form that’d make their Host happy and unwilling to seek help to remove them. Unfortunately, it seems people here love their fish and crustaceans so much that Hosts would willingly crawl inside their manifested Wretch-Class Myrmurs just to feel what it’s like swimming around in the dark.”

“Wretch-Class?” Vivi blinked at him, still pale as she looked back at where the Host had sunk into the canal. “But wasn’t that a Blight-Class Myrmur? The lobster was wrapped around it like a living armor.”

“Nope. Sure looked like a Blight-Class at a glance, but it was just a Wretch-Class Myrmur that manifested externally. You saw the man’s umbilical cord, didn’t you?” Gael said, raising a finger. “Remember: Blight-Class Myrmurs have the option to manifest around their Hosts like a living armor, and they can also manifest externally with umbilical cords like Wretch-Class Myrmurs, but Wretch-Class Myrmurs can only manifest externally with umbilical cords. If that lobster were a Blight-Class, all the connecting tissues and tendons would’ve made it that much more difficult for the Fisherman to yank out the Host.”

Maeve visibly shivered, clutching her briefcase closer to her chest. “That’s awful. So the Host wanted to be inside it?”

“Well, the guy was probably already deathly sick before he got a Myrmur planted inside him. Can’t really count on him being sound of mind, so…”

He gestured to the canal at their side as they walked.

“We may not actually need the Fishermen to help us find the Breeder,” he finished. “If most Myrmurs here, Wretch-Class or Blight-Class, have their Hosts inside them, then we just have to fish them up ourselves and interrogate the Hosts the same way we interrogated them in Ironwych and Bleakhearth. Some of them have to remember something about the lab they were operated in.”

Jin looked toward the canal, frowning. “But can we fish them up ourselves?”

“Hey, it can’t be that hard. We just have to beat the Fishermen at their own game and fish up as many Myrmurs as we can so they don’t get to fish them up. Who here has fished before?”

A brief silence passed through the group. Gael looked at Fergal. Fergal looked at Cara. Cara looked at Maeve. Maeve looked at Gael. The teenagers looked at each other in turn, and so did Jin and Vivi.

Gael cleared his throat.

“... Welp. I guess we’ll learn,” he said, clapping his hands. “You know, I’ve always wanted to own a fishing company.”