5:55 A.M.
February 20
Frostmonth 22
Saint Shepherd’s Church, Limeroom, Veotera
The sound of loud shouting startled Gary awake. He blinked in the predawn darkness of his simple room, rolling out of bed as he grabbed up one of his tomahawks and strongly opened the door. The shouting was much louder now; and he sourced it as being in the main hall of worship. Without thinking about it he banged sharply on Remmy’s door three times with the butt of the tomahawk’s handle before taking off at a good speed to open the door that would lead to the main hall.
The low candlelight of the handful that were lit to provide navigational points overnight were drowned out by bright roaring torches. The torches were held by city guards who bore two of their comrades between them and were shouting loudly for Remmy. He heard stirring old man noises behind him and shouted back through the open door. “Remmy, get up! We got wounded!”
He himself cleared the distance in seconds as he skidded to a halt and ran his eyes over the situation. Two guards were injured and being laid out in the entryway of the church, while those who carried them fretted uselessly over their fellows and those bearing the torches illuminated the grisly scene. One was bearing several deep stab wounds right through their leather armor, while the second was missing his chest piece entirely. Gary could see the savagely torn fasteners and judging from the huge gash across the man’s belly he figured grimly that the blow would have been more instantly fatal if the armor’s impromptu removal hadn’t taken some of the momentum with it.
Whirling to one of the long strips of crimson cloth that ran across the upper parts of the room, Gary sharply tugged the anchoring portion that was against the wall and a large section of the cloth fluttered down over the pews. This wasn’t the most sanitary option but Pearl magic could take care of any early-stage infection. The tomahawk’s sharpened blade shredded the cloth into various sections and sizes. He began handing cloth to the fretting men and shouted instructions.
“Press the cloth into the wounds! Ignore the sounds of pain and start plugging holes! The blood loss will kill them!” That got their attention as Gary had put some of his ‘military brat’ impersonation of his uncle’s ordering tone into the instructions. They quickly snatched the strips of cloth out of his hand and started pressing the material against wounds. He himself took the largest of the pieces and pressed it very strongly into the abdomen wound of the one man while his buddies worked between them to cover the numerous smaller holes in the other man. He saw Remmy out of his peripheral vision and that the man hesitated in deciding which man to treat first.
Gary spared a glance at both, medical diagrams of the locations of organs and blood vessels flickering to life brightly in his mind’s visual processing centers. The stabbed man had a few in places that worried him so he spoke up.
“Remmy, get the stabs first! Focus on the mid right one and two on the front left first! They’re closest to organs! This guy will hold while you plug those three!” Hoping he hadn’t just condemned the man he was tending to, Gary watched as the shock went out of the old man and he knelt between the two guards that were holding cloth to stab wounds and brought his healing relqa to bear. The gleaming white light enveloped the man’s torso and Gary figured he could almost hear the wounds ever so gently stop being as wound-y.
His adrenaline was in full swing at this point, so when the doors at the building’s front swung open to an icy blast of predawn air, Gary snatched up his tomahawk and was about to make someone really sorry when he spotted more of the guard coming in with men far less wounded. Gary cursed aloud in English as he looked at each wounded man in turn and told the healthier ones to start cutting strips of cloth and applying pressure to wounds. Thankfully there weren’t any more as serious as the first two.
Remmy had stopped the bleeding enough that he turned from the man he was working on and shuffled on his knees to the man Gary was tending to. As Remmy focused the healing glow towards the man’s belly, he risked taking the cloth off for a moment to assess the full condition. Almost immediately he recognized the sight of flash-frozen flesh and spurts of presumably warm blood shoving scarlet slush out of severed veins and arteries. He immediately shoved the cloth back into place and muttered darkly under his breath.
The guard captain materialized out of the dark morning; his face a rictus of frustration and rage as he saw his men in various conditions. Before he could say anything, Gary spoke into the pained groans filling the chill air.
“He get the jump on you?” A snarl erupted from the captain’s throat as he slammed a fist sideways against the doorframe at the question.
“He was expecting us! He had traps and everything ready for us.. How in the name of God did he know?!” Remmy didn’t look up from his work even as Gary felt the flesh under the cloth moving ever so slowly under the healing energies. He hoped he wasn’t getting in the way by having Onyx Affinity. Gary watched Remmy’s face as he worked, noticing the sweat already forming on the man’s brow. This had to be bad for his health to wake up like this and go right to work with high-intensity magic.
“Come in and close the door. The cold’s not helping anyone.” Despite both the priest and captain outranking him, everyone was reacting to his authoritative tone. As the captain understood his slip and moved to rectify it, Gary looked across the rest of the men that were sat in spots along the foyer. His eyes crawled over the locations of wounds and wrote each of them into moderate triage status. The captain saw the way his gaze flicked over his men and tried to understand the logic going on in Gary’s head. “You guys with the torches, keep moving around and make sure everyone stays awake and alert. Let me know if anyone starts getting slurred speech or sluggish response times. How’s he doing,” he called over to the guards watching stab guy. They looked up at him with bleary eyes and nodded.
“He’s calmed down a little bit. He’s stopped moani..ng.. Fuck! Wake up!” At least they were quick on the uptake. The two took turns and managed to barely rouse the man into a pained groan. He looked to Remmy and put his half-bloody left hand on the old man’s.
“Remmy, take a break real quick. Let me hold the relqa.” Looking at the gray-eyed youth, the man wearily nodded and surrendered the cross in his hands after he stopped the glow from it. Gary grasped the magic tool and jerked his hand towards the cloth at the man’s guts while looking at the captain. The man took his place as he slid over to stab guy and took a better look at the wounds. The extremities were scratches and scrapes; nothing too major. Gary chose to focus on one of the wounds in the left front. It looked at the right angle to damage the lung, and the man’s gurgling wheeze told him the guess was right.
This was the first time he’d used Remmy’s cross, but the standard rules for relqa seemed to apply: a slot in the bejeweled icon accepted a thread of his Mana Reserves and through some instinctual working from the device he focused a beam of healing Pearl magic into the chosen wound. He mentally held an image of a healthy lung and chest as the magic did it’s work, trying to imagine the tool stitching the wound closed with threads of light that replaced themselves with unmarred flesh. Quickly - but not as fast as he’d have liked due to his Affinity fighting the tool’s nature - the first wound sealed shut. Moving to the second left side wound Gary felt this one was closer to the arm-side of the heart. Not immediately fatal but more lung work to be done; Gary sent a bit of thanks to the Veoteran God that the bundle of cardio muscles hadn’t been nicked.
Even as he concentrated on the wound healing itself, he noted that Remmy was looking over his shoulder at the work. A glance back and up showed the priest was clearly impressed with his work.
“A pity you’re not Pearl Affinity,” Remmy muttered as the second wound finally sealed enough to satisfy Gary. “Your work is precise.. More of your learnedness?”
“Yeah. Don’t know what the local attitude is about knowledge on human anatomy, so I’ve been quiet about it. These two are the worst off. Everyone else can get a quick dose once I’m done here and with the other guy over there. Give you time to catch your breath.” Remmy patted Gary’s shoulder as he looked at the right side wound. The indentation of the flesh and continued wheezing of the man told him it was probably a punctured lung on this side too thanks to a broken rib. Gary glanced at his Mana Reserves and nearly choked as he started on this third wound.
*Mana Reserves: Prodigy (52%)*
Holy fuck he was getting shit mileage with Pearl magic! The wound ended up consuming another seven percent, putting him at 45% remaining. Thankfully, whatever the magic was doing behind the scenes in stab guy had sucked the blood out of the man’s lungs and upper torso, expelling it with the last bit of the right side hole sealing up. Almost instantly the man’s breathing sounds went to something pained but clear. Gary shook his head and turned back to the man with the slashed guts.
“Remmy, this damage is way worse and I’m already under half. This guy’s probably gonna be as much as I can do. Sorry but you and some other people are gonna have to pick up the slack once I run dry.” Grunts of assent echoed around him as he moved the cloth out of the way and used the tool to begin weaving together intestines that had gashes in them at several points in a line. The blood was already slowing down as the flesh at the edges of the wounds all began absorbing the peripheral energies to keep the man’s blood inside him.
In the end he managed to get the innards whole and about a quarter of the slash before the light of the relqa sputtered and died in his hands. Swooping in, Remmy reclaimed his tool and began the process of finishing the work as Gary fell back and leaned backwards trying to catch his breath and his mental focus. He took a moment here and focused himself into breathing deep and calm.
His head lolled to look towards the guards; each of whom were watching him with a great deal of respect.
“Any of you guys got decent Control or Reserves?” A couple of the injured made assenting noises and the captain stood up to start looking after his men. With a groan of sudden exhaustion Gary rolled onto his hands and knees and pushed himself to his feet to help. The ‘help’ consisted mostly of exchanging the religious relqa between several of the guards to heal themselves and their comrades. By the end of the ordeal, everyone was exhausted. Gary sat by the stab guy and slit guy whom he’d moved next to each other with some help. Remmy sat in one of the pews offering his morning prayers a bit earlier than normal.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
“Thank God you two were here this morning,” the captain said as he disgustedly used some more of the fallen crimson cloth to clean his hands a bit. “I have to apologize for this rude intrusion, but I think you understand why, yes?”
Gary checked the men’s pulses as he nodded. They were weak but steady. They were both pale as hell but that was to be expected given the circumstances. He looked to the captain and spoke himself.
“These two are going to be out of commission for a while. They’ll need high-density food to help recover their blood. Liver, marrow, leafy greens. Even with the whole System thing it’ll take them a while to get back on their feet. So, what the bloody goddamn fuck happened?”
“You were right, young man. About most everything. The man we’re looking for uses ice magic, he uses 「Stealth」and「Sneak Attack」, and he ramped up his killing quickly enough. We had the bastard cornered.. Well it turns out he had us cornered.” The captain shook his head in anger. “Most of us got winged by traps in his little hideout in the slums; but Williams and Sage got hit by the bastard good. The way he fought I think he’s some flavor of Assassin?”
“..I’m torn between asking if you sealed the city gates and hoping you didn’t.”
“..Why is that?”
“Chapter Seven, line Thirty-Six of The Art of War. ‘When you surround an army, leave an outlet free. Do not press a desperate foe too hard.’” He saw confusion on the faces around him as he quoted the venerable text. He waved his right hand vaguely in the air, noting with disdain it was bloody. The captain offered an unused corner of the cloth he’d taken up and Gary accepted it with a nod of thanks as he clarified. “The expanded meaning is that if you cut off all avenues of escape, you give them no option but to fight to the death. And there is precious little in the world scarier than a person with nothing to lose.”
“And you’re worried this bastard will do just that?” Gary nodded wordlessly. “That’s going to be a problem, then. I already sent runners to seal the gates and access to the ramparts.” Gary muttered a curse in English as his head lolled back to regard the ceiling while he thought.
“Damnit. You have a description of the guy?”
“About Father Wikloss’ height, skinny, sallow-faced. Black hair shaved on either side of his head to leave a kinda greasy-looking strip along his head. Ratty clothes like you’d find in the slums; and the craziest look I’ve ever seen in a man’s eyes. He was screaming about voices in the dark and how they wouldn’t shut up and let him sleep. Kept jerking this way and that as we were surrounding him like he was hearing people talk from just behind his ears.”
Gary pulled up the pictures he’d taken the other day and looked for the man with that description. Third to last photo had the guy kinda crouched down looking through the crowd at about waist height. No wonder he hadn’t picked him out immediately. And that thing about hearing voices bad enough to react to them and trying to look for them? That sounded like textbook schizophrenia. He lacked the medical training to say for certain and hadn’t talked with the guy at all, but several medical texts on the subject popped up in his Virtual Network with a list of symptoms highlighted. A ragged sigh escaped his lips as he lowered his head back to a normal inclination.
“Good news, I know why he’s doing that. Bad news, he’s clearly never had any medicine to mitigate it and he’s probably full-on insane at this point. And with all this blood on his hands? He’s gonna have to be.. dealt with. Poor bastard never stood a chance,” Gary muttered the last to himself quietly, but everyone clearly heard him. He swept the ranks assembled with a gaze, daring anyone to challenge the statement. None spoke. “But yeah. Gates are sealed, access to exit points are sealed… What about sewers? Drainage tunnels, stuff like that?”
“Too small to get out of.” Gary gave him a look. “I’ll get them checked just to be sure. What should we do? We can’t protect everyone in Limeroom, and he tore through my guards.”
“He tore through your guards with a prepared ambush. Probably to ‘deal’ with the voices in his head which are the result of mental illness he was probably born with. Guess the System doesn’t discriminate based on disabilities. Yay for equality,” Gary stated sarcastically while desperately making a large-font and bolded note in the report for Earth. This was a big problem. “Now he’s going to be on the run. Once he understands he’s trapped, he’s going to go on a rampage. Which of you guys has he gotten a good look at?”
Most of the guards raised a hand. Gary pulled a face at that answer.
“You guys need to go to the ramparts or out of sight or something once you leave here. Lurk in the shadows. I’d advise opening a gate, captain. Stick with the cover story about that adventurous Ripper Rabbit. This is the most dangerous time of this hunt, so we’re going to have to let things cool down for a bit.”
“Cool down?! He just tore through my men!”
“And he’s flooded with terror and out of options right now. At the best of times he probably thinks in circles, and this is going to have him thinking in tangled knots. Gotta let him calm down or you’re gonna eat fatalities. I’m torn about how to advise you to handle this, captain. Panic will cause the citizens to start making mistakes that’ll trigger the guy, but he’s hopped up on fear of pursuit right now so he’s probably trying to find a place to hide. I’m out of mana right now or I’d be out searching for him right now myself.”
The captain let out a frustrated noise as he put his face in his hands. “God in Heaven, how did I botch it this badly? I’ll be lucky to keep my head after this.” Taking a few moments to panic quietly, he finally calmed down and shook vigorously after he stood up to regain his composure. “Alright. Seal the exits, leave one open. Lock down the city in pursuit of this ‘Rabbit’, but not tightly enough to spook the populace. Essential travel only, move in groups.”
“If you can buy me about three hours, I’ll have enough recovered to pull a trick with one of my Skills. I’ll have one shot, but I can practically guarantee a hit. Past that, I’m straight hands-on.”
“..I can buy you three hours. Those of you who can walk, help me with these two. Couple of you stay here and help.. Help clean up. We need to make sure this house of God is clean for morning services. You two,” the captain pointed to the least-beaten-looking two guards who were the ones with the still-burning torches. “You two stay here and help. We can’t set off any sort of panic. Anyone asks why you’re here, say you’ve been assigned to protect the grounds from this Ripper Rabbit we’ve been hunting the last few days. Not a breath of that bastard, understood?”
“Yes, captain,” they replied in unison as they handed their torches off to a single guard who double-fisted them. Immediately they turned to help clean up the blood on the polished floor as Gary got up to join them. He moved over to Remmy and put his hand on the man’s shoulder.
“Never a dull moment, eh? Rethinking the cloth?” It was admittedly a bit of gallows humor, but Remmy lightly rapped Gary on the bare chest with the back of his knuckles.
“Never, my boy. Though this morning’s been a bit too exciting for me. Take down that other cloth. We’ll say they’re down for cleaning. You fine men follow me; I’ll show you the cleaning supplies.”
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A couple of hours later, the place was pristine. Remmy was in full swing with his sermon, the guards stood quietly at the main entrance, and Gary was in his unmarked cassock assisting the elderly priest as he normally did. Nothing was out of place except for the crimson fabrics in the rafters which had been noticed but quickly dismissed as casualties of taking too long to dry from being washed. The service was pristine and clear.
Inquisitor Seraphina de Lys had chosen this morning to attend this church’s service. Gary tried not to look directly at her. She was way too sharp and would catch on immediately. The last thing they needed was a zealot interrogating the two of them in the middle of a packed church. In the corner of his vision he kept an eye on his Mana Reserves as the number ticked slowly upwards. It was like staring at a pot of water and willing it to boil through sheer force of will. It didn’t help that he was also furiously scrolling through and researching hostage negotiation tactics and how to de-escalate violent situations with mentally ill people.
These were things he’d never thought he’d need but he was grateful for having asked for back when the nanotech archive was installed in his skull over a month and a half now. It had been a curiosity at the time; more a test of the physical capacity of the device than a desire to use the dozens of libraries worth of knowledge in another world to help the local law enforcement track down and subdue a schizophrenic serial killer with as few casualties as possible. Or to run a triage situation in a church where he used a magical cross to bathe mortal wounds in healing light magic. Nothing could have prepared him for these things.
Yet here he was. The sermon thankfully ended, and the parishioners filtered out under the guard’s advice to travel in groups because of a monster that might be loose in the city that they were tracking down. Everyone but Seraphina failed to see the look on his face with their backs turned as he leaned forward onto the altar and finally hung his head to try and mentally catch his breath.
“Why are you stressed, Father Wikloss? Your speaking on the tenets was subdued this morning.” Gary glanced up a bit from where he leaned to see those azure eyes of hers rotating between him and Remmy with a professional frown on her face. Remmy looked to Gary, and Gary looked back before shrugging with a visible grimace. “..Answer me.” She’d clearly seen the look, and the shift in her tone was to one of a higher-ranking official and military commander demanding an answer now. Remmy looked to the front doors and the guards understood the unspoken order. The doors were closed and sealed. Seraphina didn’t so much as flinch as they closed, instead smoothly rising to her feet and straightening her skirt before standing ramrod straight and giving a full glare at the continued silence to her order.
“There is a killer loose in Limeroom,” the old man said wearily as he rounded the pulpit and made for the closest pew to sit down in. HIs form was drained-looking now as he sat down heavily on the wooden bench. Seraphina’s glare lightened a little but Gary could still very clearly see the Inquisitor of the Sacred Purge in the nun’s stance as she waited for more details. “Apparently he’s been a problem for some time, but this morning was particularly bad. He tore through a number of the town guard and both Gary and I exhausted our mana keeping the poor souls alive.”
Her face finally changed as she twitched at the left eye in annoyance. Before she could chastise him for not calling on her, Gary chimed in. “There wasn’t time to call you guys in. You charging in with the whole weight of the Reclaimers will spook the guy even further and lead to a killing spree that ends in suicide by cop.” The assembled people looked at him askance at the final part of the sentence and he understood it wasn’t translating properly into Veoteran. “Cop is shorthand slang for law enforcement where I’m from. Town guard and the like. The phrase ‘suicide by cop’ means a person forcing the law enforcers to kill the person in the field insead of being captured and put on trial.”
“Which explains the way the guard at the gate are reacting this morning. The city is on a quiet lockdown.” Nods told Seraphina yes. “Your hunt is to be one of secrecy, and me coming in force would be the final triggering event you seek to avoid.”
“Aye. The killer in question is highly unstable due to an illness of the mind. We’re trying to let him calm down a bit so we don’t trigger a bloodbath. The captain with the bushy facial hair is coordinating the response and trying to far more quietly sniff out where he may have gone to ground. I’m hesitant to call upon the Reclaimers, but sneaking in a few in civilian garb might be possible if we do it piecemeal. Remmy and I are both dry on mana for healing, but I’m recharging pretty quickly to help in the hunt’s final phase.”
“You want healers on hand, but with great subtlety. I will be of greater assistance in that capacity than those under my command. While we wait for the call, I would ask for a more in-depth explanation of the situation, good Delver.”
“Thank you, Inquisitor. Here’s what we know so far…”