Splitting up felt like a bad idea. I couldn’t fight. If I ran into anyone from Black Nova, I was dead. The same was true for third party bad guys. But Crunch was right, I supposed. We didn’t have enough time to leisurely stroll through the big industrial building looking for an answer. We needed to get lucky, and it needed to happen fast.

Crunch and Gorb spread out through the crucibles and casting equipment to scour the ground floor while I ran to a set of stairs near the back. It looked like offices up above to oversee the production process. While I knew there wouldn’t be a tunnel connecting to the main objective through a second story office, I had another idea: there was at least a chance that some of the controls still worked. If I could get the crucibles moving or some other heavy machinery fired up, it would at least be a distraction. At best, maybe I could use some of the technology to actually participate in a fight despite my pacifism flaw.

I took the rusted metal stairs two at a time and entered an office littered with papers. Drawings, schematics, and lots of spreadsheets covered just about everything. The far wall had what I was looking for. A series of levers, switches, and buttons lined a complex panel. Unfortunately, there wasn’t any electricity, and I didn’t know the first thing about factory controls or anything remotely close.

I flipped the first huge switch and punched the button next to it just to see what would happen.

Nothing.

“Fuck. So much for that plan.”

I quickly rifled through the large wooden desk, but I didn’t find anything other than paperwork and a few loose tools. I pocketed a drawing compass missing the pencil that simply looked neat, then turned back for the stairs.

Just then, I heard Crunch’s voice echoing through all the metal. “Medic!” he yelled, and I bolted down the stairs in his direction.

Two more injured compatriots had appeared at his feet.

“Shit, that looks bad.” I dropped down next to the male soldier and didn’t need to activate my borderline useless ability to know he’d lost his left arm at the elbow. Blood had already pooled beneath his stump. The man was in bad shape. If he didn’t get serious medical help soon, he was done.

The other injured team member was a woman, tall and lithe, though she didn’t look too bad. Just a lot of dirt, bruising, and judging by her thousand yard stare, a severe concussion.

The one armed man had come in clutching a grenade launcher, and I had to kick it off his body to work since I still couldn’t really grab the thing and just move it.

“Something… blocked the… blocked the shot,” the concussed woman stammered.

I put a small emergency water bottle in her hand and helped her lean against a piece of machinery. “Don’t speak. Just relax. Drink some water,” I told her. I would have to deal with her second.

Thankfully, the battlefield treatment for a missing arm was very straightforward no matter how little experience I had actually dealing with that kind of injury. Nurses and surgeons in the Civil War had patched up hundreds of missing limbs without ever attending a day of medical school or taking out a single student loan, after all.

I wrapped a tourniquet around the stump, tightened it as best I could, and secured it with a heavy application of bandages. When I had the bleeding under control, I injected some pain meds into the man’s shoulder and then went to help the concussed woman.

Sadly, there wasn’t much I could do. Concussions took time to recover, and I already heard more people coming. “Shit, we have to go.” I wrapped the woman’s arm around my shoulder and struggled to lift her to her feet. She barely had the strength or mental wherewithal to add any effort at all.

Crunch appeared from behind some equipment, and I saw Gorb not far off, waving for us to follow. “We found a basement. Come on.” He looked over the woman for a second and shook his head. “Where’s Gordon?”

I nodded over my shoulder. “Back there. Lost an arm. He might not be much use any more.”

“Understood.” Crunch pulled another grenade from his armor and headed in Gordon’s direction. A suicidal last stand was better than nothing.

I practically dragged the woman to Gorb, and we made our way down another set of rusted stairs to what looked like service tunnels lined with dozens of pipes and cables. Everything was pitch dark.

I dropped the woman from my shoulders and propped her up against the wall. I had a small flashlight in my medical pack, so I used a bit of gauze to strap it to my wrist. I needed my hands free if I was going to help the woman all the way down the tunnel. In the light, it appeared to be a few hundred yards, though I couldn’t tell if it led in the correct direction or not.

Crunch returned, and he seemed confident that we were taking the right path. “Follow me,” he said, clicking on a flashlight of his own.

We were halfway down the tunnel, moving slow, when I heard an explosion from up above. “Rest in peace, Gordon,” I said under my breath.

“Don’t worry about him,” Crunch said. “I think he dies in about eighty percent of our missions. He’s a bit of a lunatic with that grenade launcher, always using it way too close to his target and getting himself blown to bits. Honestly, I’m surprised he made that long. I just hope he took out a few Black Nova assholes as he died.”

I would have shrugged, but I was still carrying the concussed woman with no help. Gordon’s plight got me thinking about dying during a mission. I had done it once, and all things considered, it wasn’t that bad. Not the worst thing I had ever experienced. Not by a long shot. But how would so many repeated deaths mess with someone’s psyche over the long term? Some of the elderly patients at Sunnyside Manor constantly freaked out about death. It was the only thing on their minds, and they bemoaned their impending doom for hours at a time to anyone who would listen. Others were blissfully unaware, sedated by their own dementia diagnoses.

It was a rare nursing home patient who fell into the third category of making peace with their end of life. Those patients were usually the ones with attentive families, spouses still alive, and, not surprisingly, lots of money. Needless to say, the patients with vast resources rarely stayed long at Sunnyside before transferring to a private facility with one-to-one care and a built-in spa.

If I got the chance, I wanted to talk to Gordon about dying so much. Clearly, there was no limit on how many times he could get snuffed out. Maybe being responsible for his own demise was some kind of consequence-free suicidal ideation. Freud would have loved being dropped onto Archon-6 with so many radical patients to analyze. Well, I still didn’t know if cocaine existed, so maybe Freud would have actually hated it.

Exhausted, we reached the end of the tunnel, and I let the woman slide from my shoulders. A sturdy metal ladder leading back to ground level was bolted to the wall.

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“The hatch is locked,” Crunch whispered. He held a small device to the metal hatch and waited. A few seconds later, he brought it down and showed us a screen. “Heat signatures from three life forms. Close. Maybe too close. I don’t know if we can breach.”

I motioned to the alien. “What about psychic boy? Or… girl? Psychic thing?”

Gorb sent me a feeling of amusement, then stepped up to the ladder and touched the hatch with an unnaturally slimy appendage.

Voices came from above. They were too muffled by the heavy hatch to make out what they were saying. At least one of them sounded panicked.

There was some shouting, and then Gorb suddenly erupted through the hatch like a slimy alien geyser.

Crunch followed quickly behind, and I made the decision that a good doctor wouldn’t leave her wounded patient behind, so I stayed safely in the tunnel. Overhead, the fight was quick and loud. Metal crashed into metal—probably Crunch’s hammer—and people screamed. I wondered if Gorb would make any kind of noise if it got shot. Maybe. Probably not.

All the action died down a moment later, and Crunch’s face appeared where the hatch used to be. “All clear,” he said. Then his eyes rested on our concussed party member. “Leave her for now. Gorb has enough physical stat to carry her up the ladder, but there isn’t time. And I think we’re close.”

“Well, good luck,” I told the woman. Her eyes were rolled back in her head, and a line of drool had escaped the corner of her mouth. Somewhere along the way she had dropped the water bottle I’d given her. “Hey, you have a weapon?” If we were going to leave her behind, we might as well set another trap like we did with Gordon.

In response, a blazing bright energy sword appeared in the woman’s hand, then quickly rolled from her grasp. At least some fragment of her awareness was still intact somewhere behind her eyes. Maybe she would recover enough in the next twenty minutes to find us. Probably not.

“Ah. Not much use there, but it would have been nice as a flashlight.”

I gave her one last look and then climbed the ladder. Two enemies had been torched by Gorb’s flamethrower, and the third was barely clinging to life in the corner. His chest had been pulverized by Crush’s hammer, and his breathing came in halting starts and stops. Judging by the damage, he wouldn’t last more than another minute or two. The internal bleeding would get him before he suffocated.

We were in a small foyer or reception area attached to what I believed was the building we were trying to get to. Crunch checked his watch and seemed happy. “Right on schedule,” he announced.

“You know, it would have been great to sit in on the planning and strategy meetings before the mission,” I said. Hell, just having a watch would have been nice, though without knowing the schedule, it wouldn’t have actually been useful.

Crunch went to a window and pulled apart the blinds a few inches. “Right on time. The rest of the squad is almost here.”

Two more of Crunch’s team members arrived a few seconds later. They didn’t come in through the door but rather materialized like the injured people had earlier, exactly according to plan. We had five in total. Overall, that felt pretty good. We were still six strong if the woman and her energy sword down in the tunnel counted.

“The sniper is still out there. Hasn’t moved. We saw him get James. Tried to take him out ourselves, but he’s bunkered up real good,” Mia explained. It was apparent from the way everyone acted around her that she was in charge.

While Mia briefed the group on the next few steps of their plan, I tended to the wounds of the man who had teleported in with her. He was short, probably around my age, and missing an eye, though that was clearly a pre-existing injury and not one he acquired during the mission.

The man had taken a few cuts and scrapes on his arms, a few of which were deep enough to require stitches. As he explained, jumping through a glass window hadn’t been his smartest decision.

I was starting to run low on medical supplies. Everyone agreed that the mission was coming close to an end, so my lack of gear wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. We had two rooms left to breach, and then Crunch’s final stun grenade was supposed to incapacitate our targets long enough for Gorb to extract whatever information from their minds that we needed to win. As long as Gorb survived and could pull it off, we had it in the bag.

My survival, on the other hand, was not integral to mission success. Only in the lowest level combats was I required to stay alive. As Zhenya had explained, my importance was essentially a teaching tool to drill into everyone’s heads how important the Medic was. Past level forty, I had to imagine that every team ran with a handful of Medics. Scoring a kill on a rival guild’s high level Medic had to be devastating.

When everyone was patched up and ready to go, Mia led the charge. As a Tech Specialist, Mia wielded a plasma cutter and used it to melt the hinges of the next door to slag. Everyone stormed into the room—but we were too late. A single dead body and a hole in the ceiling told us that Black Nova had gotten there first.

On the other side of the next door, Black Nova’s Psi Operatives were already interrogating the captives.

We didn’t waste any time. Mia slagged another set of hinges with her plasma cutter, and then all hell broke loose.

It was impossible to tell how many Black Nova soldiers were left. Explosions and gunfire poured through from the door, and I ran back the other direction. Our team returned fire just as aggressively.

The one-eyed man I patched up grabbed me and Gorb, and the three of us sprinted out of the complex. “Come on, second way in,” he growled.

We were a few steps out the front door when the man took a sniper round to the head and collapsed in a heap at my feet. I screamed and launched myself over him, quickly scrambling for any cover I could find, but no second shot came. It would be an immense amount of luck for the sniper to be out of ammo. Crawling on our bellies, Gorb and I managed to get to the rear of the building where the firefight still raged.

“Have any breaching charges? A bomb to get through the wall?” I asked.

Gorb shook his head.

Judging by Black Nova’s entry method through the ceiling earlier, I guessed they had entered that way again. “Give me a boost.”

Gorb’s slimy hands lifted me just high enough to get my torso onto the roof. I turned back, but I was far from strong enough to lift the seven foot alien to the rooftop. “Shit. If I had a damn gun, it would be over!” I was right, and Black Nova had entered through the roof, probably while their sniper had us pinned down in the industrial building.

My mind reeled. There had to be something I could do. All the while, I simply prayed that the sniper was out of aether. If he wasn’t, I was a sitting duck.

I stole a quick glance at the battle below and took a mental note of where the hostages were being kept. “Gorb, use the flamethrower. Slag the wall right here!” I shouted, pointing to the corner opposite the hostages.

The alien flooded my mind with a sensation of determination and got to work. I had to flee the roof before the heat caught me on fire, and the building was red hot in moments. Still, it wasn’t actually burning or crumbling like I thought it would. It was just getting hot.

“Fuck!”

My mind wasn’t used to coming up with combat plans in the thick of battle. I was a nursing assistant at an old folks’ home, not a three star general leading thousands of troops on Omaha Beach. I tried to come up with some way my spoon could be useful, but that was a pointless exercise. What could I do, spoon down the hot wall like a giant bowl of molten soup? Not a chance.

Gorb’s flamethrower clicked. It was out of juice… or plasma, or whatever. I really only had one option. I hopped down and braced myself against the wall like a makeshift human ladder. “Climb up my body, Gorb,” I commanded. “Put your slimy tentacle arms to use and get to the top. You can see the targets inside and read their minds. Do it!” I couldn’t lift him, but if he used me like a ladder, maybe it would work.

After a second of hesitation, Gorb took a running start and used my spine like a springboard. Its seven foot frame crushed me against the concrete. My face scraped as I struggled to launch the alien, and I took all kinds of damage. My health, already just half of what everyone else got, dropped by twelve points. I felt like a professional wrestler had drop kicked me into a wall, and in a lot of ways, that was exactly what happened.

But it worked. Gorb pulled itself to the top. A few seconds later, everything went black, and the mission was over.