To say the following few days had been easy after I finally got myself home would be a lie, I’d recovered from most of my injuries, including most of my right arm and my chest was no longer burning, meaning I didn’t have anything where it didn’t belong. However my knee never stopped hurting. The pain inside of it didn’t show itself unless I attempted to put any kind of weight on it, but it could still move around a small amount before it suddenly felt like fiberglass was stuck inside.
The biggest issue was that I was suddenly riddled with nerves after the incident with the cartel woman, and the ‘accountant’ that said he was her brother. Watching the news didn’t help much either, there was practically zero coverage of the area that once housed Larrell’s Pit games, no cops investigating the death of a known crime boss and a C Class Altered at all. Hell the biggest news to come out of the area the following few days was that crime had actually gone down by a decent percentage, at least until someone else moved in to take over the territory. I thought grimly.
While I was technically a criminal, illegal pit fights and all that, I never really considered myself one. Sure I was breaking the law, but I wasn’t causing harm to society or the people in it, besides the other guy in the ring with me. It always got a little irritating dealing with Pit fighters who had the backing of a gang though, because if you won you suddenly had to make yourself scarce of that area, even if the Pit Boss of the area had rules against fighting outside the ring over fights inside the ring, gangsters are notoriously stupid, and will go through a lot of trouble just to deal with one person who ‘makes them look bad’. They almost never realize that having a dozen guys with tattoos and calling themselves a gang like the “East Flyby Boys” didn’t make them dangerous, not when they were breaking the rules of someone capable of taking care of all of them by himself, or when he has another seven people below him capable of doing the exact same thing a dozen times over. Sure I probably could just ignore them and continue on fighting in that area, but even if the Boss wipes them out after they almost kill me, or actually do finish the job, I won't be alive to laugh at them for their stupidity.
Another even bigger problem came from the email in front of me I’d received after I went into a doctor's appointment a few days after the incident. which told me that whatever I had been hit with had left a sizable chunk of magic stuck inside the leg. While this normally wouldn’t be the biggest issue in the world, simply having the leg removed and having a cloned one added back on afterwards if the doctors were unable to drain it in one way or another, the magic itself wasn’t attached to the bone or even the leg itself, but my soul. Souls have a tendency to take the form of the person it belongs to, apparently. The most insidious thing about it was that even cybernetics, or a simple metal leg wouldn’t solve the issue either, moving your arm while using a cybernetic prosthetic and your soul still acted as if you had an arm, the material or design didn’t matter in the slightest. During the invasion there were cases of people getting hit in the head by soul weapons and surviving, and if they didn’t end up completely brain dead a lot of them lost their sight, or smell or some other vital sense.
How the fuck did some small B-Class Altered even manage to get their hands on a soul weapon?
While the glass tube wasn’t an obvious soul weapon, as none of them really look any different from common weapons or tools, I had pretty much already figured it wasn’t just made of glass. Normal glass would shatter a dozen times over before it caused any real harm to me, let alone the amount of damage it’d need to take or deal in order to be a passable weapon for a B-Class Altered, I’d only figured it to be some kind of tool or material gathered during the invasion. I hadn’t even in the back of my mind thought the small clear tube would be something so dangerous however.
If I go to the doctors what are the chances one of them ratted me out? What are the chances I show up to some smug prick holding a wad of cash and a black van two feet away ready to make me disappear or end up in a ditch somewhere? The Accountant wasn’t wearing their brand, meaning he was more than some street thug they used for day to day situations.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
Regardless of what some people probably thought about Mark, he wasn’t stupid. Passing through school with high B’s or low A’s most of his life with relatively little effort could help prove that, the fact he only didn’t go to a college somewhere was because of the cost would also help. Plus, you don’t really need a college education to become a professional fighter, which had been his dream. This also helped with his recently in-depth research into the soul weapons that had apparently injured him.
A soul weapon, as the name suggested, is a dangerous tool that has the capability to interact with or damage the soul. There were only a dozen recorded cases of them even existing that the public knew about, and possession was illegal in every country - even the backwards ones the Radical Sun Cartel operated out of. The research into soul weapons was so highly controversial and regulated that a good portion of the population didn’t even believe they existed, chalking their abilities of killing people instantly into just being another form of magic, and testing was publicly done only on volunteers who were comfortable with some object poking their very existence. This of course sparked protests in the scientific and magical communities over the ethics of doing anything to anyone's soul. A soul isn't a body, you couldn’t just heal it like a wounded leg or a sick patient who reacted poorly to a batch of new medicine.
Only two of the twelve known soul weapons were capable of damaging someone's soul, according to public record anyways. The other 10 were all things apparently designed by the invaders to protect their souls, amulets that used magic to put up shields around them and pieces of armor with a dozen other usages on top of that. Half of the soul arsenal revolved around making sure you took someone out of a fight as fast as possible without risking your own soul in the process it seemed.
If they are lugging around something like that with them there isn’t a single doubt in my mind they’ll kill me if they find out I'm still alive.
While the most damaging part of the email towards my own safety came near the end, where the hospital wanted to have me come back in immediately for more tests to guarantee that the magic had actually affected my soul instead of simply interfering with their instruments in some way to provide a false positive, which had happened in the past a few times. While the hopes of a false positive filled me with a small amount of hope the fear was still there. If this was actually a soul weapon and even a single person talks to other people in the hospital about it, let alone the cartels it could become a media hell storm in an hour.
‘This just in, in the wild Ghetto’s of the Glass City a new soul weapon has apparently been spotted in the hands of the ruthless Radical Sun Cartel, more in five!’
Like I needed anymore of their bullshit either after the Ambrosia outbreak.
Hello, young boy, would you be stupid enough to talk to us in front of dozens of camera’s about how your mother nearly started a second Ambrosia outbreak by attempting to treat the sick! Not like it's her job or anything and your family is getting death threats for risking people's lives as she risks her own for their sake! We promise to only put this in a good light on television!
Or afterwards when she succumbed to it.
Can you tell us how it feels being the son of two heroes, one who died at war and another who is in a coma because she decided to treat Ambrosia patients instead of euthanizing them like 90% of the world? We promise not to ‘accidentally’ give out your personal information while reporting it!
Scumbags, the lot of them. Worse than most of the wannabe gangsters I had to constantly deal with.
One way or the other I need to deal with this doctor situation, if I go alone there’s less of a chance of anyone else getting hurt, but if I go with someone during the day there's less of a chance of them trying to take me. Either way is a risk… and I don’t want to risk the lives of other people like Donovan over my own stupid mistakes. So I go during the day and alone. One way or the other I have to make my peace with the mistakes I have made.
So then I go tomorrow, and hope for the best.