19) Emotional Damage

The way it worked was that Core had T-Rex put in the locations of the people he could detect under the rubble on a grid with the location as well as the depth marked down. Then Fable directed me to where to walk over to check for a corpse.

If Core said there was a body in a spot where I didn't sense a corpse, then Core went to work moving the larger pieces of rubble, and emergency workers went in to move the smaller stuff and get to work extracting people from the wreckage.

The reason I had Fable with me is because she had all her power going to maintaining one of her Illusionary summons who everyone just called the Nazarene.

With all of Fable’s power available to him, the kindly eyed, bearded middle eastern looking man could function as a Healer 2.

Having her summons be able to use a power Fable herself did not possess is what made her a Rank 4, and should have made her a Rank 5. But as she put it, “In a fight, Rank 5s tend to go after other Rank 5s, I decided I would be much better off being underrated than targeted."

So for now, Fable was following me around dressed as one of Core's personal bodyguards, "Protecting my field corpse." as she put it. While I checked on the bodies I tried to see if by some chance there was someone I could save.

Fable had been dressed as a guard before we came and had covered it up with an illusion of her dressed up like a Hindu bride, which oddly was visible to cameras and other devices, even though I couldn’t see them at all while inside a corpse. But it did mean she could show me a selfie.

After arriving, she slipped away and dropped her illusion, while summoning the Nazarene dressed in a Core Care EMT uniform to follow Manifest around as he moved from aid station to aid station to open gates to both local and neighboring nation’s hospitals. With the Healer 2 stealthily stabilizing people before they gated out.

The existence of the Nazarene had bothered a lot of people until the Pope acknowledged him as a tribute that personified some of the teachings of the original, rather than an impostor. It turned out that Fable was a woman of a strong but subtle faith which she personified in the Nazarene.

Which was being put under strain today.

I looked her over, seeing the tired look in her eyes. “Do you need to take a break?”

She shook her head. "I want to do something more than just send one of my guys out to help.” She held up her tablet. “This I can do all on my own.” She paused for a moment. “How can you do this all the time? Just… looking for the dead.”

I held up one finger and stretched out my senses, feeling the cold flesh around me long enough to know the broken man twelve feet down was beyond saving.

"The first dead body I ever sensed was my own. I understood from the outside looking in exactly how much a corpse is just a shell. Having to go back into my own dead body haunted me for a long time, but the best way to get through something is to just keep going."

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We moved over a few dozen feet as I held up a finger. “It’s a child, an infant, still warm. Someone get to it now.” Then I let my body collapse while I focused my full attention on the child.

Heal it. Heal what? It must have died just moments ago from a lack of oxygen. I can make its heart beat, but that isn't going to put fresh air in its lungs. The damage from oxygen deprecation on its brain may be a little too subtle for my abilities.

I open its eyes, but even if there had been any light, it was a baby, its eyes don't work that well. I couldn't see anything.

Then it was alive again, trying to breathe, it could feel me and it tried to scream, to push me out, but its sense of self was too weak.

I can keep it here, just on the edge of dying again, hurting…

A Brute 3 even as an infant is as strong as at least six full grown men. I drove its little fingers into the wreckage around me, its tiny little nails tore out of its fingertips as I gripped something large and solid, and shifted it, pushing away the rubble that dropped down on me, pulling and kicking like mad to get the little form past concrete and rebar. Feeling every moment of their terror and pain.

Then there was a light as the weight lifted up in the air above the child, then there were voices and warm hands.

And I was back in my own flesh, alone and shaking so bad that Fable called back her summons and had him appear next to me.

He laid his hand on my forehead, and my panic and horror faded away. “Be at peace. The child is safe.”

My panic attack put us nearly a half hour behind before I convinced Shimmer to let me go back to work, who knows how many people may have died because of my delay. My weakness.

It took us another twenty hours and a few touches from the Nazarene to clean out fatigue poisons before Core declared that all bodies which were intact enough to possibly still be alive had been checked and dug up. The last two hours were just Core slowly and carefully digging up the last of them because he was so mentally worn out that he had to take things more carefully to avoid hurting anyone as he dug them up.

Then they sent me straight home while the rest of them had to formally go through customs after claiming I had never physically left the country in my own body. They didn’t even stop at the Royal Court, our base, to let me strip out of the Orpheus uniform. I begged off any of them from following me in the house, instead just waving at them over my shoulder as I walked away from Manifest’s closing portal.

I made it up onto the porch, dropped my helmet with a clatter, and collapsed into my rocking chair after a moment the screen door opened up and Fafner and Muffin slowly approached me. The smaller dog lay her head on my knee, while the larger one lifted a paw to set it on my arm.

Scorn stopped next to me. "Do you need to talk about it?"

I shook my head at her and patted the two dogs' heads.

She walked over to sit on the old green swing glider. “What about sex?”

I slowly turned my head toward her with a look of shock.

She shrugged. “It would help. And I have a need myself every now and then.”

It started with some shaking, then a few stuttering laughs before I began whooping and giggling for the next ten minutes. Getting a hold of myself now and then before breaking into a new barrage of laughter.

The dogs barked and ran back and forth while Chester stuck his head out of the barn to check on me.

Eventually, the pizza the Mice had ordered for me arrived, Scorn paid for me.

“Eat, shower, and go to bed. Alone tonight. We can talk about my needs some other time.”

I ate until I was full, and then almost brought it up again as I remembered what I had put the child through. Then I drank a small mason jar full of hard cider that was ice cold from sitting at the back of my fridge and then took a quick shower before I crawled into bed.

My still damp hair would make the pillow wet, which I hated, but I fell asleep for nearly two hours before the nightmare of being underground woke me up.

A little while later I heard my front door open and a moment later Scorn lay down with me in the bed. Wrapping her arms around me, she whispered. “Don’t get excited, you just need someone by you to go back to sleep, and you would wake up in a bed on fire if I let the dogs in.”

"And don't start flailing around if you have another nightmare, you're a lot stronger than me."

I managed to get another two hours of sleep, the only thing in my bed when I woke up again was the scent of the forest early in the morning.

Later that day I got my marching orders to make an appointment with a therapist.