In a meeting room, poorly lit on account of a projector displaying a series of images on one wall, a man hoping not to immediately get fired nervously reported his part of the briefing to his superiors. Taking a deep breath and adopting an aura of relief, he says, “frankly, it’s a miracle she’s still alive and now stable.”
The attempt at a joke to lighten the mood fell on apathetic ears, “yes. It is. Had Miracleworker not been so accommodating of a schedule change, this would have been the first death of an MG in five years.”
Gulping despite his sudden dry mouth, the presenter continued, “a-anyways, she will be in a medically-induced coma for a few weeks. Would have been months, but MGs are… Ahem. I’ll just play his report.”
With a press of a button, the projected screen changed from the previous assessment of the recent Breach’s effects to a video seemingly recorded from a laptop the owner was carrying around while ranting. The first few seconds of the video showed a figure dressed up in a set of fancy and blood splattered scrubs. Seeing that everything was working, the figure took a deep breath and pushed his hand through frazzled and graying hair that looked out of place with their otherwise youthful appearance.
After another few second of them picking up the recording device and starting to pace while collecting themself they started, “what the fuck was any of the idiots in charge of this disaster thinking in their glassy-smooth brains? I looked through the concerningly sparse records on my patient and guess what I saw? Two- maybe three- weeks from when they contracted to this pile of dogshit. And don’t worry about how I got those records, just worry about how this mess is going to look once it gets out.”
Some eyes started to twitch at the attitude and language, but no one made moves to stop or contradict what was being said. “One of you must have decided that technically having been in a breach before justified skipping the months of practice and training and shit we’re supposed to go through- and for good fucking reason. “Yeah it’s not like boot. But to be frank, if you removed the psychological torture part of it, any fuckin’ MG could breeze through boot. Despite looking like a walk in the park to your traumatized asses, it serves a very important job. Fucking surprising, I know! The most experience most MGs will have in crisis management before contracting is- I don’t know- college life? Maybe a few particularly bad cases will have had to deal with domestic shit? The point is new MGs are seeing their new world through heavily tinted glasses.“It takes a few months to slowly and intentionally introduce them to what it will be like in a Breach. Anyone who gets selected will naturally be better at dealing with this shit but dint of being selected, but without our program or similar, they end up like the firsts.”
One of the people in the meeting started giving a death glare to the person who was presumably in charge of approving the new MGs inclusion in closing the Breach. They were uncomfortably ignored by their target who suddenly found the message indescribably intriguing.
“Anyway, while I have a lot more complaining I could do, your thick skulls would just deflect the blame onto someone else, so I might as well get onto the requested portion of this video. Although if that first part gets cut out, I’ll know and I’ll find the people who did that and give them the brain surgery they clearly need. All the way up the chain as high as I need, so don’t think you’re safe in your comfy office.”
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The figure stared into the camera for an uncomfortably long amount of time before setting the laptop on a counter, a slightly shimmering field containing a myriad of equipment and an operating table with a body laying on top visible in the background. From off camera, they grabbed a stack of papers and started reading.
“Hmmm, I’ll skip all the minor stuff that I know you won’t care about- even though anything as small as a fucking scratch on an MG is worth worrying about. Ah, here we are.“The really obvious shit: severe blood loss, unprofessional and unneeded amputation of the left arm, a shit ton of frostbite across the left shoulder, more on the left portions of the chest and back, even more fucking frostbite deep into the tissues- almost reaching the heart- third degree burns along the left thigh, smattering of necrosis on the skin and in organs, and a few broken bones.”
The members of the meeting who knew how generally resilient MG went from angry at the video to stunned and disturbed. The other, less experienced members followed suit after seeing that reaction.
“Off the bat, the patient’s Semiseelie was nice enough to confirm the radiation poisoning symptoms were unintentionally self-inflicted- concerning in its own right, but it's your job to worry about the implications of that. Similarly, the broken bones and many of the unmentioned injuries were a result of the MG not realizing how strong the effects of their magic would be.”
Slipping back into their ranting mode, the figure yelled, “MGs don’t get self-inflicted injuries when properly trained. You fucking idiots basically handed a kid a bomb and told them to go blow up some demons.”
One of the people in the meeting started to stand and open their mouth to retort, but was yanked back down and silenced before they could start.
“Aggh… From what I could figure out from the remaining important injuries, they ran into an attempt to make a demon specifically for killing MGs. This isn’t the first time something like this has appeared, but it was certainly the most effective version so far. Granted, the victim was thrown against it well before they should have, but my previous assessment probably still holds true against a properly trained MG.“There weren’t any accessible recordings of the demon, but from what I’ve heard from the investigators, it was able to shrug off most of the damage the mostly mundane weapons should have done to it. We’re pretty much just talking about explosions and horrifyingly nasty chemical burns courtesy of the new MG, but bullets would have been a similar story. However, it wasn’t able to ignore the sudden, massive spike of radiation that killed it and nearly collateralled my patient. So, if you're keeping track, the normal Breach-containment forces would stand no chance against it.“Like always, it will take a long while for the more common demons to adopt these defenses, but it’s only a matter of time.”
If the people in the meeting weren’t concerned yet, they definitely began to worry about the implications of that statement.
“As far as offensive capabilities, the injuries my patient sustained point to thermal fuckery- likely magical in nature. When I started on the operation, the shoulder was still frozen- still literally a block of ice almost an hour and some lesser healing after the fact. Same story for the bodies of the other victims recovered a whole five hours later- although those were closer to meat-slushies.Finally, the over-cooked chunk of my patient’s leg points to a very high powered laser of some kind. This is corroborated by their squad’s testimonies of deep, focused burns in infrastructure along the route the fight probably took.“You probably already know the rest of the story, so I’m going to take a quick nap before getting back to turning an almost corpse into an almost person.”
After the video stopped, it took a minute before the first person worked up the courage to speak. It only took a few more minutes before the meeting was adjourned by the most senior member just to end the arguments.