Gregor The Cripple

Feeling it more than he heard it, a scattered barrage of shots rang out below the table, thudding heavily against the breadth of Gregor's preemptively-summoned ward, which invisibly covered both himself and Mildred. One or more of the bullets must have been enchanted, or otherwise a very large calibre, because it pierced through effortlessly – the mental backlash feeling quite a lot like a pickaxe to Gregor's head – and the barrier fell.

He caught one somewhere in the forearm of his good arm, which happened to be the only forearm he possessed, but it didn't feel too bad, not like it struck bone or ripped away too much flesh, so it was an agony that he could ignore with the aid of adrenaline.

However, he still gave a strained grunt, and the twin pains still took the rest of the world out of focus for a moment.

The shots stopped, the guns being perhaps exhausted, or the gunmen perhaps thinking their work well-done and pausing to see the results, not being aware, of course, that Gregor had erected a ward as precaution and halted most of the bullets.

In that moment, rage was his chief emotion. Genuine and pure, it had been distilled from the melange of feeling that a person might typically feel when tricked and betrayed, and it now existed in Gregor as a kind of undiluted imperative. He didn't know why they'd done it, or if they were all in on the scheme, whatever that scheme might be, or if it was really a betrayal at all, or merely clever subterfuge – but he did know hate, and at that moment, hate was all he cared for.

Without thought, being that he had neither the ability nor the time to think, Gregor lashed out on impulse with a wave of telekinetic force.

The spy went tumbling, but it washed over the enchanted inquisitors like so much water, merely buffeting them and alerting them that their work was yet incomplete.

Dimly, it occurred to Gregor that these were magehunters. Not so dimly, his dazed mind righted itself, grounded solidly upon the foundational fact that he was a fucking wizard.

The scarred inquisitor's head was thus immediately skewed by Gregor's cane as a consequence of the brief inaction of the pair. Sent flying at a speed impossible to dodge, it punctured bone and brain and bone again to poke out the other side of his skull while Gregor teleported in the same instant to stand atop the table, a ball of fire brewing above his stump and the strange finger of stars floating beside him.

Mildred, who was hunched down and probably unsure of just what in the world was happening, was too close to the danger for him to allow this fight to grow long, so he gave no quarter and acted without sloth, and drove the finger toward the still-living inquisitor who stank of demons.

There was a clatter as the man dropped his gun to grab the descending tip of the finger with both hands, and shockingly, contrary to every other time it had come into contact with flesh, the man was not immediately mangled. His hands began to bubble and blister and crack, and he screamed horribly at the sensation, but his grip held firm, and so began a struggle.

Not one to suffer the negative effects of surprise, as the inquisitor grappled impossibly with the finger, Gregor lobbed his half-formed fireball toward the table of four, who were by then all getting up and fumbling to arm themselves as if they hadn't been prepared at all for violence to erupt.

Regardless, they erupted in flame, and generally went screaming and scattering and began stripping away their burning clothes in panic. The fireball was too young to really be fatal, but they were sufficiently distracted.

The spy had also by then scrambled to his feet, but a few shots snapped off from Mildred below, and he slumped back down to the ground, gasping and clutching at his chest.

Finding the finger strangely insufficient, and his own telekinesis strangely unable to overcome the bodily strength of the inquisitor, Gregor extracted with extreme mental dexterity his cane from its new home, and sent it speeding over to assist.

The enchanted wood, proven to be entirely capable of piercing the cranium of a regular man, shattered to splinters on contact with the demon-ensorcelled fellow, shredding as shrapnel the skin on the side of his head but failing to disable him meaningfully. He screamed, still standing, mad eyes focused on the point of the finger. With insane physical effort, it began just barely to inch away from him.

This was abnormal, for Gregor's telekinesis had grown monstrous from all his constant violent practice and feats of necessity, such that he could probably lift a few horses at a time if he truly exerted himself, but this man's two arms of mere meat were giving him trouble.

The inquisitor attempted very briefly to reach a hand into his coat, but the act gave Gregor too much of an advantage in the struggle and he was forced to hastily resume his grip.

More gunfire came from Mildred down below, and Gregor saw the man's gut erupt with the disturbance of bullet-struck fabric, but still he stood, screaming anew. His hands were by then horribly mangled and blood streamed all over from his eviscerated scalp, with his ear hanging off and his skull exposed to the air, but still he stood.

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By a combination of random choice and good luck, Mildred then shot his left kneecap.

The limb buckled and he went down to kneel on his right, still managing to keep the finger away from his face.

Pushing this advantage, Gregor telekinetically grabbed whatever little shards of cane he could find and jammed them into the inquisitor's eyes. Evidently, his eyes were not nearly as sturdy as the rest of him, and he really started screaming.

Gregor then jerked the finger up and the blind inquisitor lost grip, beginning to flail his curdled hands about in a desperate attempt at defence. Rather than demons, the man now stank overwhelmingly of panic. Winding up for a pregnant moment to bring to bear a truly tremendous force, Gregor then rammed the finger down into the pitiful figure's screaming mouth, and was rewarded with the horrible sound of teeth snapping away and of all the various walls and membranes of a human throat being instantly stretched to the point of rupture.

His neck bulged hideously, and the taut skin split in places where it could stretch no more.

Obviously, this did not kill him, and neither did the finger violently disassociate all of his fleshy bits as would be typical, but it did certainly seem to be corroding his insides in the same way it had curdled his outsides, which was a positive development. The agony ought to have been exquisite. A little like making an ordinary man swallow a red-hot poker.

While he squirmed and thrashed, unable to breathe or scream around the finger, Gregor looked to the four others in the room.

One had burned to death, lucky him, and still smouldered in a growing fire in the corner of the room. The three living others were hunkered down behind an overturned oak table, shuffling it slowly toward the doorway in hopes of escape.

Gregor teleported near and seized the thing, halting it with invisible force, and raised his voice in furious announcement.

"Graciously, I am willing to entertain the possibility of your surrender, pending sufficient exculpatory explanation," he intoned, malevolent as possible, finding for once that it would be useful to interrogate his enemies.

In response, however, a curious thing then occurred.

A shot sounded off behind the table, and after a brief struggle of shouts and thumps came a second, then a third. Upon telekinetically lifting the oaken barrier with a snarl, Gregor found the victims of two murders and one suicide, all slumped together on the ground.

Back at the original table, whether by bloodloss, suffocation, or pain, or as an unnatural consequence of the man's strange anatomy being exposed for too long to the finger – as opposed to the regular consequence – the inquisitor of uncommon hardihood was also dead. The room had been depleted of danger, but Gregor wasn't satisfied, and for more than one reason.

Looking past the corpse, he locked eyes with Mildred, now sitting on the ground with her hands clamped to her side, shaking slightly, and making rapid, shallow inhales.

"I, uh, ooh… can you- um… fuck," she attempted, failing to say anything, but effectively communicating the problem.

He was there with a snap, and Mildred felt herself rise gently into the air, dripping blood as Gregor moved her out, up, and back down onto the top of the table.

"You have been shot."

She nodded mutely, settling into a half-laying position, propped up by an elbow and clutching at her side with both hands. Her face was scrunched and there were tears in her eyes.

"Show me." Gregor asked, noticing as he stretched out his hand that his own wound was only a deep graze. Without really paying attention, he had some of the bandages on his other arm unwrap themselves and migrate over to bind the fresh injury.

He peeled away her hands for a brief glance, then pressed them back firmly, finding that Mildred thankfully wasn't gutshot, not really. She'd been a little hit above her left hip, just off to the side of the area where all the important things lived, hopefully. Usually, at least.

Organs aren't exactly solid, so they like to squish and stretch and move around slightly according to posture and life-long habit. In this way, no two sets of innards are the same, so Mildred's intestines might have been nicked, which Gregor knew could cause her to die of sepsis very slowly and painfully.

"It'll leave a scar."

"…Damn."

Rolling Mildred so that he could see her back, Gregor found that the bullet hadn't exited any nearer her organs than it had entered, which was good, and she seeped only blood, red and angry. No other fluids that he could see. He leaned in to take a sniff. Nothing putrid. No bowel leakage. It was probably alright. She'd only lost some meat.

"Fear not, dear Mildred, for I have much experience in the area of getting shot, and uncharacteristic skill in sewing. You will be fine." Before that, however, he would need to stop the bleeding and clean the wound. It was a very familiar procedure, but this would be his first time ever doing it to someone else.

Between the bullet and her body had once been a layer of cloth, and though the bullet might now be gone, there was no guarantee that the same was true of however much of that cloth it had dragged in, so he, not wanting Mildred to die from eventual infection, would need to go wound-fishing.

"Mildred," he began, "I am going to need to dig around inside your hole."

She snorted.

Taking from his robe the little vial of hydra saliva that had been so helpful in tattooing his head, he dumped most of the remainder onto the only clean bandage he had available, then, sliding her clothes very gently up and away from the wound, he pressed it firmly to the blood-slick skin of her back and had her roll over to lie supine, still with his hand underneath to hold it in place.

"And afterwards, I am going to flush the wound with alcohol. It will feel worse than the bullet, so here," Gregor produced a bottle from the depths of his sleeve, "start drinking while I work. Get a headstart on the pain."