Mark stood, looking above the crowd.
He had beaten back the demon and banished it back to hell, breaking the illusion and freeing the people from their enthrallment.
Even now he could see people starting to rouse, suddenly jerking up from their kneeling posture. Seeing this Mark raised his hands above his head.
People in robes, all unarmored and disarmed, rose one by one. The room began to lose its horror and reverted back to the warehouse it had been previously.
The first noise to break the silence was a sob, as the shock faded and someone realized the thing they worshiped as a god was fake.
He flinched, hearing a gunshot and someone crying out from somewhere in the room.
Mark saw another robed person start screaming, they tore the leg off of a chair and rushed the stage.
The screaming cultist’s face was obscured by the same gray clothing they all wore, replacements for any equipment that may have been more problematic. They blurred and slammed a shoulder into Mark’s chest, he felt his breath catch as he was sent sprawling.
They mounted him and raised a makeshift club to cave his skull in, before Zirrilit kicked them hard enough to cave in half their chest cavity and knock them off of Mark.
She pulled him onto his feet and stepped between him and the dangerous crowd.
“Stay behind me. I don’t know if any will be too fast like that.” Zirrilit growled.
Mark took in breaths, but at this point his adrenaline was still overcoming his fear and pain.
“Why are those cultists suddenly going crazy?” Mark asked, “How come showing them their beliefs were a lie makes them more dangerous and not less?”
Zirrilit gulped, staring down at him with sudden concern. “I’m gonna have to pick you up and run-”
The room was growing worse by the second, Mark saw someone eating another person. They didn’t even seem to be based off of a carnivorous animal, from what he could see they looked like a standard humanoid.
A shot rang out and someone else cried in pain. Someone was on fire already and-
Then an armored man with a rifle warped in directly to Mark’s right, releasing teleportation’s signature burst of bright purple light at the very edge of what humans could see.
A second figure obscured with metallic heavy armor and a clear crystalline shield covered Mark from the left.
Both dwarfed the human, covering him with their weapons as well as their bodies.
“This is the Pantheon Conglomerate, follow me towards extraction.”
The shielded one had a command skill, and their words cut through the confusion and adrenaline within Mark’s system. Mark nodded and they made their way forwards.
Someone short and with the face of a shrew leapt out of Mark’s own shadow and attempted to drive a stake into his side, only to be interrupted by the rifleman’s butstock smashing into its face.
Another unseen attacker sprayed fire over the area, the shield guard intercepted the heat and prevented it from reaching Mark. The damage was negligible to the rifleman, who’s armor resisted the heat, and Zirrilit ignored it outright.
Half a dozen of the cultists went down screaming in that same fire, Zirrilit tossed one over her shoulder and grabbed a second one on reflex as they were pushed past the crowd towards a corner of the room by the guards.
They reached a door, which was used to separate the clustered warehouse from the office section and threw Mark through the doorway.
The two officers took positions guarding the door, Mark and Zirrilit were ushered further into the tangled maze of office cubicles by another four guards who had been waiting in the room.
One with a saber grabbed Mark’s shoulder with an offhand, he felt his shoulder begin to tremble and go numb.
Some type of healing magic?
They were all armored; their faces were covered and there was little visible to tell them apart with. Even wildly different armor sets and body types were layered with the same blue and black color patterns to create an illusion of uniformity, making it difficult to predict who or what was under the armor.
The group eventually stopped in a restroom further within the office space, already he could hear gunshots echoing down the corridor and screams from what he could only assume were the cultists.
Mark saw a large sprawling magical circle glowing with the same purple color that had burst from the teleporting guards, the bathroom stalls had been ripped out of the walls to make room for the gigantic construction littering the floor.
One of the largest guards grabbed Mark’s side and pushed him forwards before speaking with a slightly distorted voice, “You are cleared for extraction. Stand in the center heel to heel and cross your arms across your chest.”
Mark did as told, blinked, and was shocked by what his eyes opened to.
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
Instead of the home he had been allocated, Mark stood in the middle of a hospital. Bleached white walls complemented a similarly bleached tile set on the ground. There was a row of counters with a sink bearing containers of cloths and needles.
Three people wheeled a stretcher into the room, Mark saw someone who seemed to have thick green veins popping out of their skin, confusion gripping him as he noticed a leaf seemed to be stuck to their face.
The orc was the one who grabbed him and lowered him into the stretcher while the elf injected him with a needle- they were not injecting him, Mark saw the syringe fill with his blood.
“Running diagnostic. Surface level poisons not present, we will need special equipment for a more advanced appraisal.”
He tried to raise his hand, why were they carting him around when he could walk?
Mark tried to speak but found himself in a coughing fit staring at the ceiling.
The woman with the plant roots in her face grunted, she pushed her hand into Mark’s chest. His eyes followed her hand and then he saw the blood.
He had been shot?
The roots in her hand began to writhe and lifted from her body before beginning to burrow into Mark’s flesh.
He screamed before he passed out.
~
Mark woke up staring at a bleached ceiling, on a bed that was pure white.
The entire room was colorless, only changing where he saw foreign contaminants.
A leaf had fallen and stuck to the corner of the window sill. He could see his shovel at the foot of the bed.
Other than that though, everything was white so as to be easily bleached if necessary.
Mark tried to rise, but a sharp pain in his chest forced him back down, he cried out quietly and glanced down at the bandages covering his chest.
“What the fuck?” Mark whined.
He heard a door open, glancing up he saw a large, intimidating, bald orc wearing a white apron on top of plain white clothing.
“How do you feel, human?” He asked.
Mark gasped slightly, “Why- what the fuck happened to me?”
“You got shot, on top of some over-strained musculoskeletal problems and someone cursed you a bunch of times.”
“What?”
The orc sighed, “Do you remember fighting the dee-moan?”
“The demon? Yes! Wait, did I win?”
“From what I heard you won, you were on the news, human.” He explained. “Then the people the dee-moan abducted started rioting and you were hit with a few natural weapons.”
“Ah, so I got cut up by claws or something? I think I would remember being bitten open. How come I’m still in the hospital bed? Shouldn’t you guys be able to instantly heal wounds or something?”
“Your injury seems to have been a singular gunshot which ripped into your chest, along with a large number of curses inhibiting some of your natural abilities such as regenerative ability, luck, and endurance as well as some type of parasitic creature no one noticed until we ran advanced appraisals on you.”
Mark slowly grew paler as they went through the list of things that were wrong with him.
“How the fuck are gunshots and curses natural weapons.”
“Making projectiles go fast is not a rare ability. Neither is weakening enemies. Throwing a few hundred different people in a room means at least one is going to be able to get through someone’s defenses no matter what they are.”
Mark groaned and laid back. “How come it still hurts though?”
“If it didn’t, would you get up and strain your injuries?”
Mark didn’t answer.
The orc opened the door and started to step back into the hall. “There’s a button on the table next to you, if you need a nurse just press it and I’ll be right in. It's directly beside the remote for the TV.”
Mark’s eyebrows rose, “Thanks.”
He reached for the TV, accidentally pressing the button to alert the nurse on the way to the remote. Mark waved them back outside and turned the television on.
There were two elves behind some sort of desk, after a moment the camera changed to a third elf standing in the rain during some kind of storm.
He couldn’t understand what they were saying, but he understood this was some kind of news channel.
Mark changed the channel, flipping past a couple more news stations before finding something more artistic, with crudely drawn but colorful characters. This too was in an unknown language.
He switched off the cartoons and eventually settled on some kind of organized sport. Two people in protective gear pulled out sabres and began to sword fight.
The human struggled to follow their movements, everything was fluid and fast enough that he failed to understand what was going on beyond their attempts to stab each other.
It ended when one of them disemboweled the other and stepped back before raising their arms-
Mark turned the TV off and stifled a gag, the sudden muscle contractions burned at his chest.
He paused for a moment, panting and getting his sudden nausea under control, before he heard a knock on the door.
Instinctively, he tried to toss the pure white sheets off of his body to get up only for the sudden movement to tear at his wounds.
He grit his teeth as where previously he felt nothing it now felt like he was being jabbed with a red hot poker, his hand slammed down on the black box with an obvious red button, signaling the nurse.
The person at the door knocked again, after a minute or two the orc came back into the room.
“There’s a red dragonoid named Zirrilit here to see you.”
Mark pushed himself up slightly, to a sitting position against the backboard of his bed. He had been distracted easily and now felt some shame for not worrying about her.
He wondered if she would have some sort of perspective on the demon, he had only shown up at the last moment and knew so little about something which allegedly hated his guts and prepared for some kind of war with his god.
Zirrilit ran through the doorway and slammed her claws onto the foot of the bed.
“Maaaark!”
“Yes?”
“Maaaaaaaaark!”
“Whaaaat?” Mark tried.
She tilted her head for a moment wondering why Mark was yelling, before barking out, “Oh, I was just excited.”
Mark chuckled a moment, it was obviously a bit of light humor to ease up the mood but he took on a more serious face.
“Alright, but I need to know about what we saw. What happened before I got there?”
Zirrilit nodded, taking on a more serious tone as well. “I don’t remember much, it’s blurry like the first time.”
Mark sighed, he knew that hitting the demon with a shovel scared it off, and at some point it started bleeding from its face. But that was still so little knowledge about something that had kidnapped hundreds.
Was he going to have to live in fear, waiting for the next cult to pop up?
“Mark, I know what you are thinking and I just want you to know, I think it's a good idea.” Zirrilit said, suddenly more serious than he had ever seen her.
Mark just stared, he didn’t know what she was referring to.
She continued, “The other guys that the demon grabbed besides me, most of them survived and most of them are in a real bad spot right now. And so yes, I do think it would be really easy to display dominance and convince them to follow us right now. They are very vulnerable.”
“What? Why would we do that?”
Zirrilit tilted her head, Mark sounded hurt, “Because then they would do what we say?”
“I don’t think taking advantage of people is a good idea, Zirrilit. Shouldn’t the people who are helping us be helping rehabilitate them?”
“That’s what gave me the idea! They are being re-hab-ilitated here, since the whole place is in quarantine and no one can leave right now! Plus, then you can train them and make like a hundred people who can fight demons so that we can’t get jumped!”
“Zirrilit I don’t know how to fight demons. I just hit it and it ran away…” Mark paused as he mulled over what Zirrilit had just said, “Wait did you just say we’re quarantined? Like, did they lock the doors or something?”
“No, they warped the entire hospital to a smaller island off the coast of the original island-”
“Are we trapped in one building with all those surviving crazies who started mauling each other? What if one of them is still possessed by the demon?”
Zirrilit paused thinking about it, “Maybe they don’t want those guys possessed by demons to spread their ailments to everyone else? Which is what a quarantine prevents?”
Mark eyed the shovel at the foot of his bed, one of those lunatics had shot him and this was his only means of defense. “How did you find out about all of this?”
She stretched over, grabbing at a small pamphlet on the end table next to Mark’s bed and then deposited it in Mark's hands.
He held the folded paper in his hand and read the front page; Religious Cult Rehabilitation: A Guide to Safe Sects.
Mark pinched his brow.