It took Lowe a moment to orientate himself when exiting the portal.

And by 'orientate,' he meant 'vomit profusely. This made for a less than stable-footing for the short, dark-haired woman who appeared seconds behind him. The blood-covered figure slipped in Lowe's sick and went sliding into a shop window.

Then, a giant followed, gouts of blood streaming from a succession of wounds, any of which were clearly mortal. His unconscious - at best - form added its own fluid to proceedings, sliding across the cobblestones on the same track as the woman, crashing into her and through the window.

Lowe stood and moved towards them, but then the portal stone exploded, and Hel sailed through, landing far more elegantly than anyone else had managed thus far this evening. With a wave of her hands, she directed her flight directly to the shop the other two had violated and landed next to the enormous man.

"Fuck a duck, T! What happened to him?"

"Advanced Class," said the dark-haired woman, shaking with pent-up tension. "What the fuck have you got us into, boss?"

Hel turned to look at Lowe, her face expressionless, and then down to her injured friend. "Late. Charl first. Have you got any potions?"

"I've used them all!" the woman's voice was approaching hysteria. "It was a fucking Advanced Class!"

Hel cursed and put her hands on one of the wounds on Charl's stomach, trying to staunch the flow of blood. "How come he's not healing?"

"That guy - he tore out a bunch of organs! - Hel, you don't understand how bad it was. I've never seen someone more so fast. If it wasn't for Charl . . ." Tenia paused and shivered. "I can't remember ever being so underpowered for a scrap."

As Lowe watched, the giant began shrinking as if the air was being released from him. As someone who had become fairly familiar with mortal injuries, he couldn't see how the guy was still alive, let alone that there was any chance of healing him.

Hel looked over at him, her face grim. "We need to move. If whoever that was possessed an Advanced Class, just destroying the corresponding portal stone won't slow him down for long. But we can't move Charl like this. He's bleeding out!"

Lowe put up his hands. "Tell me what you need me to do."

"Can you heal him?"

Lowe shook his head. "My Skill is linked to me. It only kicks in when I'm hurt; I can't direct it outwards."

Tenia's face clouded with scorn. "Fuck's sake!" She squatted down at Charl's side and pulled a belt out of her inventory to die around his severed arm. Considering the volume of blood now on the shop floor, Lowe couldn't help but think of stable doors and bolting horses.

Hel tilted her head and looked at Lowe strangely. "But you do have something, though, don't you?" she said, stepping forward and touching his chest. "I have a Skill that lets me categorise people. From what you've told me of your Build, you should be flagged as a Tank, but it's not as simple as that."

Hel was staring at him intently, but all Lowe could do was shrug helplessly back. "I don't know what you expect me to do!"

"He's my friend, Mr Lowe. He came to help me free you because I asked him to. He had no questions and no complaints. He risked his life for you, and it is not right he dies like this. Not after everything else. This is not how his story should end."

"If I could do anything, I would." Lowe's eyes were wide. "I don't have a Class, Hel."

She gently pushed him towards the dying man, and Lowe knelt by his side. The amount of blood was utterly incompatible with survival - and he knew of what he spoke. Hel stood over him, still talking.

"All that means is that you don't have any limits on what you can do. You're not a Tank. You're not tied to any god. You've even got an extra technique slot than you should. I don't think you understand how free you are from the usual bullshit in Soar. Now use all that freedom and heal my fucking friend!"

Hel forced his hands onto Charl's chest, Lowe's fingers slipping deep into one of the wounds. It hardly seemed like a good sign that his prospective patient made no complaint over that invasion. Blood oozed out, but without any real pressure behind it. Lowe assumed the giant's heart had given up. He could hardly blame it.

Lowe pulled up Roll with the Punches. It sat dormant as he was, for once, carrying no injuries. There was nothing he could do to trigger it. Well, there was at least something he could do about that. "Hit me," he said to Hel.

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It might have been nice if she'd hesitated for even a second, but her fist lashed forward, breaking his nose. His Skill switched on and began channelling mana to his face.

Lowe watched the stream of blood energy as it moved. He'd never really taken the time to do so before. Of course, he was usually more concerned with concentrating on whoever was giving him a shellacking at the time, to be especially bothered about how it kept him alive. With his Intelligence at Rank 2 and with all the extra points in Wisdom, the injury was healed in no time, and it had barely touched his mana pool. His Regen would have it back to full in moments.

"Hit me again. Harder."

This time, the blow fractured his cheekbone as well, a shard of cartilage from his nose sliding back to his brain. There was an awkward pause as Roll with the Punches reversed some pretty traumatic brain damage, and then he was able to function again. "Yeah, there's a happy medium between the two. Dial it back a little next time."

Now, however, when the threads of mana spiralled towards his shattered bones, he tried to grasp hold of one of them. He might as well have been seeking to grab trails of smoke. Whilst wearing boxing gloves. Under water.

He could see them and knew in some sort of fundamental way that they were corporeal and that he should be able to do what he was attempting, but before he could figure it out, the injury had healed.

Lowe growled with frustration and sat back a little. Tenia leant forward, touching Charl's forehead. "He's pretty much gone, boss. It's now or never."

Hel raised her eyebrows at Lowe. "Can you do it or not? We're out of time." She didn't mention that the fragments of portal stone lying down the street were spluttering as if someone was trying to put them back together. The amount of power that would take with a shattered source was astonishing. Given what was coming through, anything Lowe could do to help Charl would probably be academic quite soon anyway.

Lowe shrugged helplessly. "I have an idea, but I'm healing too quickly to try it. Have either of you got a Damage Over Time Skill?"

Tenia perked up. "Absolutely," and she began twirling her fingers.

"One that won't one-shot someone of my level?"

"Ah," there was a pause, then the smiled. "Funnily enough, I actually do."

*

Under less pressing circumstances, Lowe might have objected to willingly having Body Odour cast on him. It was a rather unpleasant Skill that said nothing good about the person who had chosen to have it in the technique repertoire. As well as creating a foul stench around the subject—the intention being to force the person under its auspices to become separated from their party—it activated a nasty bacteria on the skin that, essentially, consumed the body from the outside in. Very slowly.

Hel and Tenia had retreated to the far corner of the shop, the placing a small tornado between them and Lowe in order to flush the reek up and away from them.

Feeling a touch self-conscious, Lowe put his hands back on Charl's body - he couldn't help but notice the blood wasn't running any more - and looked at the streams of mana flowing from Roll with the Punches.

As opposed to the single, powerful stream that repaired Hel's punches, hundreds of smaller tributaries were spreading out to combat Tenia's curse.

However, whereas the damage caused by the punch could be quickly addressed, the constant ticking destruction that Body Odour was delivering was much less easily resolved.

"Lowe, get the fuck on with it !" said Hel, raising several feet off the ground and filling her hands with Wind Blades. "The portal is about to come back online."

Trying to ignore the sensation of his flesh liquifying, Lowe attempted to grab one of the mana tendrils. At first, he had no luck: his mental movement just passed straight through them. They vanished and reconnected to the constant damage from Tenia's D.o.T. He tried again and again, getting absolutely nowhere.

He was about to tell Tenia to drop her Skill when a final flail dragged some threads along with it. Without any place to go, they quickly diffused into the air, but now Lowe felt he was getting somewhere.

He repeated the gesture, this time making the threads push towards Charl's body.

The attempt failed once. Twice. But on the third time, two or three of the blue threads stuck to the body and began sucking down mana like an alcoholic with the keys to the brewery.

"Lowe!"

"It's working. A few more seconds, then he might be stable enough to move," he said with all the confidence of someone who had no fucking idea what he was doing. But, somehow, he knew he wasn't wrong. He could already see the enormous man's chest rising and falling, and some of the more dramatic of the wounds began to flow with blood again. "He's still on his way out, but we've some time now."

He looked up at Tenia. "Can you stop melting me now?"

Body Odour dropped off, and the came forward to help Lowe pick Charl up; one truncated arm over her shoulder whilst Lowe went under the other. Blood was gushing from his injuries now. "Boss, we're good to go!"

Hel tore her attention away from the rapidly opening portal, a flicker of hope interrupting her spiralling dread. But where should they go? The monster forcing his way through a fractured portal could track them pretty much anywhere they went.

But then an idea formed. The gateway at the Tower of Law had significant anti-trace technology, which just might muddy the waters for long enough for them to slip away. "Anyone know anyone in the Tower of Law?"

Lowe was a little slow to respond, mostly because he was still trying to repair the damage Tenia's curse had done to his skin, but also because what skin he did have left was slickering with the gold light of a Level-up. "Erm, sure. I might know someone."

*

Leoto Bright exploded through the remains of the portal stone, his vengeful aura killing all life within a tight four-foot perimeter. He wasn't a madman, after all.

He was momentarily disappointed to see that his quarry had fled and that there was no obvious trail to follow. He sniffed the air but could not seem to get a lock on where they had gone. Which was frustrating.

The shop he was facing exploded into shards of molten rock.

But then, he reflected, they really did not have all that many options left open to them. If Lowe wanted to solve the mystery of Gianna d'Avec's murder - and after their short time together, he felt he knew the inspector intimately well - sooner or later, he would have to return to the Celestial Temple.

Bright set off at a slow saunter. He would wait for the detective there.