“Close the portal, close it now!” Ahvra winced awake to Nathym’s voice. Why was he being so loud? The girl was expecting to see the ceiling of their space bunker as her eyes blinked around, but instead it was the familiar workshop that she’d passed through a thousand times. Had she actually slept through the entire expedition? That would be disappointing.
Her eyes wandered a bit more, looking at the tops of heads and colorful hair that she could barely see, but her gaze landed back on Nathym. It was obvious that he was carrying her, and while she didn’t exactly want to be a burden, she was cozy. Would it be wrong if she pretended to be asleep for just a moment longer?
But then Ahvra was suddenly jerked upwards, clutched into Nathym’s chest. She watched the man’s eyes widen suddenly, and then the next second, all light faded from them. The next thing The Witch knew, she was on the floor, rolling away from his collapsed body.
When she turned her head back to him, the small woman was in utter disbelief. It shocked her so much that her rushing emotions forced her into her more mature form. Fortunately, her spacesuit was designed to account for such sudden growth. But her spontaneous spasms usually only lasted a second before she resorted back to her emotionless self. Yet this time, she was stuck, a never ending torrent of feelings washing over her.
“Nathym!” the woman cried out, calling her ‘Assistant’ by his name for the very first time. “Nathym! Nathym! Nathym!” she couldn’t stop, dragging herself over to his limp body, finally getting a look at the damage. It was devastating, and it made her want to throw up. She had seen worse gore, terrible dissections caused by her own hand, but what she saw brought her to ruin.
Ahvra couldn’t even process what sort of alien life form was poking out of what remained of his stomach, with a long appendage trailing back to the frame of the disabled portal, oozing some sort of goop that was leaking where it had been severed. All that mattered was that it was dead. Normally such a wondrous being would take all of her attention, scratching at her scientific obsession, but it wasn’t even remotely important when she was actually losing what mattered to her most.
The Witch’s eyes rippled, focusing on the man’s time. It was draining away at an alarming rate, and it could be entirely gone in moments, but she wouldn’t allow it. Ahvra reached out, grabbing hold of it with her own hands, grasping onto the imaginary concept with sheer will. She squeezed it tight, with every ounce of her strength, refusing to let it move any further. “You can’t die, Nathym. I won’t let you!”
Familiar black hair shifted in front of her. Drim scooped Nathym’s bleeding body off the ground, pouring life energy into his friend’s lifeless corpse. He then turned to her, his eyes a raging fire. His voice was deep, booming down to her like a god from on high. “Come then, Avhra. Let’s go save him!”
◆◆◆
“Damn it, Alk! Forget about me!” Xard protested all the way to the clinic. “I’m fine, go help save Nathym!” he roared once more when he found himself hoisted onto the examination table. But he wasn’t fine, and didn’t even have the strength to fight the woman off, barely able to stay conscious from his scorching fever.
“Shut it,” The Plague Doctor demanded, taking off his helmet and shoving medical gauze into his mouth to keep him from talking. And to save her ears from what else was about to happen.
The woman hadn’t been standing around the portal, pacing wildly like some others the entire time that the space expedition had been going on. Yet when all the commotion started, she couldn’t help but poke her head in to check things out. Everyone else had rushed to help Nathym, but when the woman saw Xard’s arm, she knew where she’d be most needed.
“I’m not much for bedside care,” Alk huffed while stretching medical gloves tight over her hands and then let out a cough. “So I won’t sugarcoat it. This is the worst infection, no… worst disease that I’ve ever seen. Right now it’s taking all my strength to suppress it and keep it from spreading. You’re so lucky that I just happened to be around. Give it a few more minutes, and it’d move out of your arm, into your heart and lungs. That’d be an agonizing way to die.”
“So you have two options. Well three I guess if you want to just go ahead and die in pain and all alone. But if you want to survive, then I need to do something one way or another. You can let me do what I need to do and save your arm. It will be excruciating and take a while, or if you’re so desperate for me to leave, then I can just chop it off. The choice is yours.”
“What will it be?” The Plague Doctor shined an examination light in his eyes to make sure he was still conscious. “Will you let me help you?”
There was some muffled grumbling, but when he realized no words were going to pass, Xard gave a pitiful nod.
“Great!” Alk clapped her hands together. “Don’t regret your decision later. A few details: I won’t be giving you any painkillers or antibiotics to fight off the infection. There’s no telling what our drugs would do to something alien like this, and someone might get mad if I use you as a test subject. That, and any change could loosen my Curse’s hold and allow it to break through. I’m sure you don’t want that.”
The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
“Additionally, as I said, I’m using the entirety of my power to suppress it. That goes with even my own diseases, so you should feel honored. But it also gives us a slight time limit. If I let my illness run rampant for too long, I’ll be unable to continue, and you’ll still die, so let’s not delay. But this also means that I can’t use it to numb the pain. Which is why your mouth is full of gauze, because I don’t want to go deaf from the screams.”
“Alright, first I need to get these rings off your hand. You can’t answer how to remove them, and we don’t have time for me to figure it out, so I’m just going to rip them off. A little appetizer of what’s to come.” Alk spliced away the first ring, and the redhead jolted up in pain, nearly flinging right off of the table from having his nerves brutally severed.
“What are you doing here, girl?” The Plague Doctor looked over to the clinic’s doorway where an intruding Senli was standing with a distraught face. “Well it doesn’t matter, you’re right on time. If you’re here to help, grab some bindings and strap him to the table. This will only go on longer if he keeps fighting me.”
The Eavesdropper didn’t even respond and got to work right away. She pinned down every single one of Xard’s limbs and bound them to the clinic table, and then did another pass to tighten the straps wherever she found slack as Xard writhed. When she was done, Alk began calling out tools she’d need, and her impromptu assistant would find them, utilizing her Curse whenever it was something she didn’t recognize.
“Alright, time to dig deep,” The Plague Doctor meant that both figuratively and literally. She sliced into Xard’s arm, going all the way until she hit bone. And then she went around in a circle, completely severing and disconnecting everything but the bone itself from the man’s main body. Alk then repeated the process about an inch apart, mirroring the same incision.
She then pulled out the ring of flesh, chucking it into one of the bins nearby. “Well that’s a good start. I’ve now isolated the main disease from the rest of your body, but it still had dug roots into the side of your torso through your nervous system. I’ll need to rip those out before we can proceed.”
Using forceps, the masked woman dug deep into Xard’s body, ripping out nerves by the bundle, performing cuts as needed to loosen them. Even through his muffled mouth, screams still leaked into the room. Once the doctor was confident she’d removed it all, she sprayed a sanitizing solution into the wounds to make sure every trace of the disease was dissolved. It quite literally burned and boiled the flesh to make it clean.
“Alright, I’m speeding up the regeneration of your nerves in your main body,” Alk explained. “You’re no longer at risk of dying, at least not right away, but we still have to take care of this arm. I can’t strip it all away at once or the skeletal structure will collapse, so we’ll have to do this an inch at the time. But first, let me take a look at your bone.”
“Ugh, dammit!” she scowled under her mask after cleaning away the remaining flesh from Xard’s shoulder. “The infection is even trying to make its way into your bones, but I fortunately managed to stop it in time. It just means a little bit more work as I go since I’ll have to sanitize them entirely.”
“It also unfortunately means that I’ll have to keep using my Curse to suppress it, or it could very well use your bones to try and infect the rest of your body again. I was hoping to be able to offer both of us some reprieve, but we’ll just have to power through it. Fortunately for you, though, since your nerves have been severed, you won’t feel the flesh I’m about to remove. But you’ll still get to enjoy the sensation of having a severed arm.”
“Strangely, though…” Alk inspected a little more. “The infection doesn’t appear to have targeted your joints and left them completely intact. Perhaps it had intentions to utilize them. Ah, I think I’m starting to understand this disease a little more. My guess is that it never actually meant to kill you, but rather, to transform you. It was going to make you like that alien, I suppose, with the disease at the helm. How interesting.”
As much as the woman would have enjoyed to start experimenting on the diseased flesh she’d already harvested, she’d at least learned enough social etiquette to not selfishly abandon her patient. The Plague Doctor buckled down for the long haul and began the tedious process of completely destroying and rebuilding Xard’s arm.
She took it segment by segment, cutting away another ring of flesh and then sanitizing the bone. But she didn’t immediately slice away another afterwards. Instead, she worked at the other end, forcing regeneration of his arm from his shoulder, using tools to block its progress and make certain that it didn’t try to over extend its reach to ensure it didn’t cross-contaminate with the infected flesh.
“I see you trying to flex your arm,” Alk mentioned once she had restored most of Xard’s bicep. “I’m sure you’re noticing that it feels much weaker. That’s to be expected. Your regeneration would have made enough muscle to ensure you could use it, but that’s as much as you can hope for. It’s practically baby flesh. So you’ll be starting over, and have to rebuild your strength from scratch, but I’m sure you can manage. And it’s certainly better than removing it forever, right?”
The Artillery gave up fidgeting after hearing that answer, having to accept his fate. And not long after, he drifted off to unconsciousness. Either his body got sick of the pain, or it was pure exhaustion from his mission and fighting off the infection. It was certainly better for him that he could escape until it was all over.
Alk wasn’t so lucky, though. By the time she was pulling off the last contaminated flesh from the man’s fingertips, she herself was on the verge of keeling over and collapsing. She nearly coughed up her lungs as she tossed aside the last bit into the medical waste tub. At that point, she could have eased her own condition, but she made sure Xard’s hand was fully restored before she did.
Then after a bit of post-op and cleanup, which included more properly storing and freezing the infected specimens for later study, Alk left the clinic to go see what she could do elsewhere—after a brief reprieve. She left Senli there alone to care for the man, certain that he was in good hands.