The Exorcist Doctor

Lorcawn had never felt as alive and as dead as he was now.

Streets buckled under his weight. Lamp-glass spattered in yellow tears and flames. The Repossessor Bazaar—his bazaar—rang with gunfire and the shouts of men in golden masks. The Rot Merchants peppered him from the roofs in regimented volleys, while Fergal and his gutter-born gnats scrambled up and down his giant frame, stabbing wherever they could to get him to focus his attention on them.

He only felt himself slashing, swatting, and swiping at them, because his own body felt strangely… distant to him.

He felt pain, but not so much. The Myrmur ate most of it for him. He felt light, but not too quick. The Myrmur was the one benefitting from it the most. Even though a connection between a Host and a modified Myrmur was supposed to be 'symbiosis'—as that Plagueplain Doctor had called it, and in those books he'd never bothered to read—that polite word didn't feel like sharing. This felt like he was being worn.

A cleaver from somewhere bit the inside of his elbow-plate and rang off. Fergal, likely, stabbed his way into sinew. Lorcawn turned and let ten arms sweep in concert. Five swats earned him two squeals. He felt two of the gnats coming loose and tumbling away, smashing into a half-built stall nearby.

In the distant coldness of fighting in a body that was no longer fully his, a memory rose.

Arms.

He'd loved the beauty of limbs before he learned the price of them. Small Lorcawn had wrapped around his mother's forearm as mortar spoke beyond the slats. That war had been a sermon of iron: War God Graves had raised an army of a thousand undead soldiers from the grave, while Saintess Severin led her Seventy-Two Demonic Plagueplain Doctors against the Pale Order… It'd been sixty years since the two of them created Bharncair as it was now.

Fifty years? Sixty years? The numbers blurred. But he still remembered the evenings of that war: the way he'd hugged his parents' arms close to him as if they could keep houses up, as if dead fingers could stop a city from being pulled apart. He'd been an orphan twice before he learned to steal.

After that, he'd learned to take. Limbs were proof a man could grow. Two hands clasped together was a prayer without words.

Had he been a maniac for grafting since then, sixty years ago?

… He didn't know.

Even that memory fogged at the edges of his mind, like a mirror breathed upon.

"Are you eating my memories, too?" he muttered inside his beetle helm. The question went nowhere. He no longer trusted his voice. How was it that he couldn't even remember when his obsession with limbs started?

Irritated, he drove four large arms into the side of a building and pulled. A balcony tore free like a scab, and two Rot Merchants who'd been perched on it went with it, vanishing under his heel as he stomped on them. Then he swatted at the roofline once more with a hand big as a cart, knocking three more riflemen into the air in bloody, helpless arcs.

More.

You can get stronger still, can't you?

As the Myrmur drank deeper from his body, thickening his plates, swelling his muscles even more—an explosion blossomed behind him, fat and hot and arrogant.

He turned slowly, blinking through his compound eyes.

Two shapes stepped out of the burning rubble at the far end of the street, dust and stormwater sliding off their coats and dresses. The man on the left wore the top half of a raven's face, covering his eyes; the lady on the right wore the bottom half, covering her mouth. Their bloodshackle gleamed ankle to ankle, and the lady straightened, raising her black umbrella in both hands.

A shiver went through the plates across Lorcawn's shoulders.

Not his shiver.

The Myrmur's.

Instinct jerked his ten arms into guard before thought translated the posture. The Myrmur knew the smell of its unnatural predator. Lorcawn bared his real teeth at that. His armor was afraid when he was not?

He tried to laugh, but found he'd misplaced that music and roared instead.

The Doctor and the Exorcist answered with speech.

"Eight-lock safety, disengaged!" the Exorcist shouted, and the umbrella in her hands became a heavy rifle. She yanked the shaft back, and it stretched, allowing the Doctor to grab onto the back end for extra stability. Then she thumbed along the shaft, flicking latch after latch with a series of loud clacks.

The umbrella snapped open, and glowing green blood swirled at the tip for a second before bursting forward.

A massive wave of toxic blood washed down the street, taller than him and wide enough to drown the entire street. It'd melt saints of saints and statues of men; it wouldn't care which. The few Rot Merchants who'd survived falling from the roofs flinched and tried to run, while Fergal and his five goons clung onto him harder in reflex, trying to ride out the wave.

But the wave ate them all, and Lorcawn braced against it with ten arms in front, chin tucked.

The blood hit. It burned. Wherever it touched his chitin, the armor hissed, ran, and blistered. His Myrmur focused all of its essence into its Art just to toughen up a little bit more—and when the wave eventually washed past him, he'd only lost all of his chitin plates. The pinkish-purple flesh and muscles underneath were still intact.

"Foolish," he rasped. "You killed your own… too..."

He trailed off, though, when he glanced down and saw Fergal and the little bastards still clinging to his body. The Rot Merchants on the ground were dripping wet and green, but they were alive as well.

… How?

Lorcawn staggered a half-step back as Fergal suddenly vaulted to a nearby street lamp, kicked it off its foundation, and then drove the entire thing into his chest. The world tilted a measure. He snarled and swatted, three arms apiece, and all six little gnats went flying off into a window.

He continued stumbling back, the lamp breaking inside him and staying lodged there.

The Exorcist's toxic blood.

It should've burned everything. It should've killed everything indiscriminately.

How did she…

He flung his sight at the pair at the end of the street, and their interface blossomed next to their heads.

[Identification Complete]

[Name: Maeve Valcieran / Gael Halloway]

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

[Grade: S-Rank Wretch-Class]

[Advanced Class: Umbrella Wasp]

[Passive Mutation: Umbral Eyes]

[Brief Description: In addition to being able to detect Nightspawn, both the Hunter and Host will be able to pinpoint exactly where a living being's heart is located in an organic vessel]

[Swarmblood Art: Purging Umbrablood / Umbrablood Covenant]

[Purging Umbrablood Brief Description: The Hunter can concentrate bioarcanic essence into their blood, making it extremely toxic to organic materials. Furthermore, they can selectively control which organic materials it is toxic to, and which it is not toxic to]

[Umbrablood Covenant Brief Description: The Host can—]

Before he could demand to see what trick the boy carried as Host, the Exorcist set the umbrella's tip behind her heel and twirled the shaft.

Then she fired a second burst of blood, only this time, it propelled both of them forward. They shot across the street in a clean black arc, two halves of a mask with a chain between their ankles and a murder between their teeth.

They hit like a hammer.

Lorcawn was already unstable enough. When they slammed feet-first into his chest, he immediately toppled over, and his back learned the shape of the street intimately. At the same time, the Exorcist raised her umbrella and stabbed it straight down the left side of his chest, thumbing a button to make it spin like an actual drill. Pain dug its nail into him. He snarled and found his breath and then found it changing shape, becoming a howl that was as much monster as it was human.

But the umbrella was stuck. It wasn't drilling through his layers upon layers of muscles fast enough, so he grinned through the whine and pain in his ears. "Not enough!" he snarled. "Not enough, I say, not—"

The Doctor suddenly laughed, and Lorcawn caught more blood being transferred to the Exorcist through the chain.

[Umbrablood Covenant Brief Description: The Host can transfer their blood to the Hunter. Furthermore, while transferring blood, the Host will give fifty percent of their attribute levels to the Hunter]

Strength walked out of the Doctor's arms and into the Exorcist's. The girl hissed through her teeth—a sound that was half pain and half appetite—and then she ripped her umbrella out so she could stab down again.

Deeper.

Again.

Deeper.

Again.

Deeper still.

The Myrmur screamed and warbled through him, but by the time it realized the Exorcist was stronger than it was tough, it was too late for it to slink back into Lorcawn's body. A hole opened cleanly on the left side of his chest, and flesh pulsed there: the Myrmur's giant, living, beating heart.

Panic ran through Lorcawn for a moment. He felt he saw the future: the Exorcist would spear the Myrmur's heart, and then he would die with it.

But instead, the Doctor reached into his coat, popped a cork with his teeth, and tipped a dram of iridescent liquid onto the giant Myrmur heart.

Nothing happened at first.

Then the Myrmur screamed again, this time not with a voice, but with every square inch of its skin. It unthreaded from him like a bad seam. It pulled at him in a dozen places where it'd laced through him, and then it changed its mind and became panic incarnate. It tried to tear all the muscles and chitin it'd given him to escape, but try as it might, it had nowhere to go.

And so it ruptured. It exploded. His entire living armor popped like a cork and turned into an ugly rain of meat, chitin, and a slurry of heat.

With its raining death came the sound of the storm, no longer muffled in his ears, though he couldn't hear much of it either way with him lying flat on his back without half of his limbs. The rest of them were torn apart, mutilated, and bleeding all over the ground.

…

But he was himself again. Only himself. His lungs needed to breathe on their own, and he needed to strain his own muscles to move. Somehow, he wasn't too bothered by the fact that he didn't have his Myrmur anymore—until two feet pressed down on his chest.

One left, one right.

He looked up.

The Doctor and the Exorcist loomed over him, and their faces made one complete expression: vengeful in victory.

Gael and Maeve stood over the old man, and for a good moment, all they did was let the rain do the talking.

Truth be told, there was a lot Gael wanted to talk about, but the thought of conversing any more than he had to with the old man made him feel like throwing up. Preferably he'd just bash Lorcawn's head in with a piece of stone and call it a night, but…

The old bastard's laugh came up like swamp gas. It bubbled, broke, and left a slick on his lips.

"Do it," Lorcawn gurgled. "Kill me. You've slaughtered half my world to get here, Doctor, so finish it. Of all the hands to take me to hell, a Demonic Plagueplain Doctor's is a noble end."

… But that wouldn't feel right.

So instead, he grinned and found it was more sincere than he thought.

"Tempting, but no," he said cheerily. "I've killed enough people to satiate my thirst for violence for the next ten years. I won't be breaking my Bloodless Mandate anytime soon again, so I'll just let you go."

He lifted his boot. So did Maeve, a heartbeat behind him. Lorcawn's chest immediately heaved for breath, and he flinched—ridiculous, after all that bravado—as the two of them turned away without another word.

While he felt Lorcawn's eyes on their backs, shadows from all around shuffled towards them. Footsteps braided out of destroyed alleys and collapsed stores as a few dozen starved, limping, and stooping silhouettes in flower masks approached Lorcawn slowly.

The first to reach Lorcawn was an old woman with an elbow that ended in a ragged sleeve and a spine bowed by ledger weights. She had a face like dried paper and eyes like glassy orbs, though Lorcawn couldn't see that, of course. When she'd come to the clinic seeking vengeance, Cara had given her a flower mask and asked her to wait in the shadows for the trumpet of victory.

Gael and Maeve leaving was the trumpet, so the old woman—first to claim a pound of flesh—glared down at Lorcawn as if she were peering into a grave someone had dug too shallow.

"You took him," she whispered, voice shaking with grief that refused to be put down. "All my husband asked for was an extension on his debt for ten Marks. Ten silver coins. Was your coffer that empty and starving for coins?"

Lorcawn evidently tried to speak, but it came out as a cough that pulled reddish threads between his teeth instead.

Others pressed in. A boy with a missing ear. A seamstress with one eye clouded to quartz. Men in shirts washed more by blood than water. Women whose hands were marked by needles and ash. One by one, the faceless horde found words or didn't, found knives or didn't. Gael may or may not have supplied them with old, rustic surgical tools he didn't need anymore.

"You took my sister—"

"My knee—"

"—my son—"

"—and said it was the cost of business—"

"—your men laughed—"

"—you wrote our names in your book—"

"—so I wrote yours in mine."

Knives glinted wet in the lamplight. Sticks were lifted. A brick made its quiet case. Lorcawn's screams were music to his ears, though out of consideration for Maeve, he'd stitched earplugs into the lower half of the Raven mask she was wearing so she didn't have to hear them.

To his surprise, she lasted only ten steps away from the horde before she yanked out the earplugs and basked in the screams as well.

"You gotta be a little cruel in Bharncair to enjoy life," Gael said idly. "I guess that means you are a little more Bharnish than you care for, hm?"

Maeve punched his broken left arm without knowledge that it was broken, though—proving his point—she didn't seem to care much for his yelp. "My mom's still stuck down there in the dungeon. Help me get her out."

He didn't respond to that.

She waited a heartbeat, then another, then heard how quiet he was being and glanced back, only now realizing he'd lagged behind a few steps.

"What are you looking at?"

Gael's head was tilted up. His night vision lenses were still intact after all that, so perhaps it was just another bout of fate—or coincidence—that he spotted a gleam of light in the distance.

Far, far away to the north, past the smoke and steam, past the edges of the Repossessor Bazaar, there was a shadow standing on the shoulder of Blightmarch's one and only public statue of Saintess Severin.

A Raven.

"... Gael?"

He turned at the mention of his name.

And for the first time since he met her, he couldn't help but think she looked prettiest when she was all beat-up and looking at him worriedly.

"Right," he mumbled, turning to glance at the statue one more time. As he expected, the shadow of the Raven was no longer there—as if he'd all but hallucinated the whole thing.

But of course it wasn't.

He only pushed the thought of it aside as he followed Maeve.