Alena reached out a hand and touched the expectant mother with a soft hand, wrapping her fingers around the scaled woman’s arm ever so slightly as the power she’d been so hesitant with only a month ago eased into the Tiliquan’s arm and diffused through their body with a precise focus and an efficiently guided instinct.

The first few Reptilia that she’d worked on were a challenge even if they weren’t that biologically different than a human. It was still tricky to understand, with how their skin and scales worked, their muscular structure and the remnants of what was once likely a tail that they’d evolved away from over time.

Of course, their organs functioned differently in some ways, bone structure and exact chemicals being thrown around—while sometimes remarkably similar—were always different enough to make it hard to fix things she would easily be able to do so on a human.

Thankfully, this was a relatively easy case. Loss of blood and potential premature birth due to stomach trauma. After fixing the muscle and tissue that had been damaged quite severely, the work almost did itself, allowing the womb to retain its structural integrity. It appears that they had somehow evolved to birth children much like a human would, though there is technically a pseudo-egg that exists within their womb that the infant would hatch from before being birthed live.

The hadn’t been any significant amount of damage to the egg, so they were safe in that regard. Alena wouldn’t have been sure how she would’ve actually fixed the egg, had it been broken, but she would take it.

She released her hand from the woman’s arm, her view snapping back to the reality that surrounded her in a way that was jarring and somewhat nauseating when she’d first began healing tens of people within a day’s work. It had started with those who were most desperate, then it had become those with the mildest injuries…

Then the wave of people with odd and totally bizarre injuries and illnesses flooded in. Those few days had been easily the most hectic of her life, healing person after person where she’d never seen the last issue, or the next issue before, and certainly had never healed it. She’d been detailing all of the strange injuries that she could within her own bound notebook, consolidating them so she can think about them more when she actually had time to do so.

Right now, however, she was hard pressed to find time to sleep. As she had slowly become better at using her own life shifting efficiently, the energy restrictions that she’d been limited by was now lifted. So, instead of her energy being the issue, it was how much she slept instead.

She’d called the bottom line at five hours, though she’d slipped beneath that at least a few times. By this point, it seemed that Rethi had forgone sleep for at least a week now, if he hadn’t slept for a few hours here and there.

At first, it had merely been something she’d begun doing because Maximilian had told her to do so. She’d though it would remain that way. She hadn’t always been the most empathetic person, though she’d had her moments, but now things were different. Every day she woke up, and within an hour she was out in some side alley, healing anyone who needed it.

Interestingly, it was far less about empathy than she’d initially thought. She was no bleeding heart, but it was the responsibility that she’d found herself with that suddenly motivated her so severely. As she went to bed at night, she couldn’t help but feel like she was wasting time that could have been spent healing just one more person.

She’d encountered a shocking amount of people who were on death’s door, some who didn’t even know it. One person had material that had been healed over within them that had probably been slowly shifting in their body for years, and if it had been left any longer, would have likely cause debilitating pain as it pressed against their nerves.

Debilitation was a death sentence. With no physical ability, you need mental ability. If you don’t have mental ability, then you cannot make money, which means you can’t eat, which means you die. Simple as that.

She’d healed hundreds who were close to, if not already debilitated. From pain, to paralysis, to the effects of exposure to chemicals, she was coming to the point where she’d seen most everything that the common causes had to give. Yet, every day there would be a new, strange thing that shocked her. Today had been massive abscesses, where one old man had somehow managed to accrue three separate abscesses that had been under both arms and on one of his sides.

Thankfully the solutions were pretty easy, though she had told the woman that was taking care of the addled old man, who must’ve been his daughter, that he would need the toilets shortly.

Alena had found that it was quite easy to use the latter part of the digestive tract as a disposal system for anything that exists within the body that shouldn’t. In rare cases, she’d had to pre-emptively give their intestines and colon enhancements that would only last long enough for the waste to be excreted harmlessly.

It was something that she had based on her boyfriend’s own biology, having been altered significantly since the induction of Divine energies into his body. The temporary nature of it was because the flesh itself wasn’t all that changed, just that it required energy to power it, and Alena had realised that her own life shifting left a certain amount of power inside of body afterwards, and once that power was completely gone, any sustained changes that had no longer had that power to fuel it deactivated. Somewhat predictably.

This little discovery, while somewhat mundane from that angle, was actually like opening up a set of doors into a whole new world of biological treatments and, potentially, enhancements. That power that remained could theoretically be given orders to execute on after her direct interaction with someone, so she could, again, theoretically administer further treatments from afar. That was if she intentionally left an excess of energy within the body so that those processes had enough to execute.

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The next was opportunity from that was enhancement itself. And while she would never be able to infuse enough of her own ether into someone else’s body to keep an ether enhancement running forever, it could likely do so for at least a little while. If they had their own source of ether, and she did the enhancement with extreme thoroughness, theoretically she could give someone a permanent enhancement via ether.

Of course, that wasn’t even beginning with the enhancements she could render with just the biological components, even before ether enhancement was introduced as a concept at all.

The opportunities were… terrifying to Alena.

They represented a part of her that could easily begin tweaking small things and quickly go off the rails, performing mass editing to someone’s body to test enhancements. If she failed? They would become an abomination like the hordes that had existed by those life shifters who had gone mad, run by instinct.

Alena found it hard to believe that she’d fall to that so easily, but she was also too terrified to find out if she was right.

The day slowly drew to a close, night rolling in over the streets, plunging them into a darkness, leaving only the most desperate to be healed waiting for their chance with the legendary ‘Mercy’.

Yes, Alena hated the name, but it had spread like wildfire through the communities that needed her healing most. Mercy and Midday, both of their personas were believed to even be angels of envoys of the Sun Court, though those that thought so were few in number.

Before long, however, there was no-one left to heal. The side streets became dangerous at night, and they would much rather live till the next day and find where Mercy and Midday had set up than put themselves in too much danger and potentially be stabbed.

Alena found the dark streets to be daunt, but with her boyfriend constantly nearby, she couldn’t help but feel comfortable. She’d seen what her boyfriends could do in a fight, against Maximilian, no less. But, even still, there was a small part of her that resided deep within her gut that spooked at the shadows of those streets.

Alena and Rethi stood in the small cross path between the mess of buildings, not speaking or breaking the silence that their personas stubbornly remained in outside of necessary words. Rethi subtly signalled the direction that they would walk, and she easily followed. There was almost always someone looking to follow them back to wherever they might be spending the night, so Rethi had become good at navigating the little side streets and finding a dead end that they would mysteriously disappear from.

What would actually happen is that Rethi would simply jump to the top of the buildings with Alena in his arms, then race away as Alena closed her eyes and shut out the world around her while the wind whipped against her skin and clothes.

However, tonight that didn’t happen. Alena and Rethi both turned towards the direction that he had chosen and began walking with sure stride. They took three turns, with Rethi signalling to her with disguised motions, and they would have taken a fourth, but the way was blocked.

Alena, who normally paid close attention to only Rethi’s movements, was confused when he stopped dead in the middle of the road. After another moment, she looked up to see a man lying in the street, almost totally still other than the slight quaking of his muscles.

A list quickly appeared in her mind; male human, mid-thirties, not quite unconscious, wounded. She looked up at Rethi and found his dull metal mask peering between her and the man on the ground. A mute conversation ran between the two of them, just from the small moments of eye contact.

‘It’s a trap.’ Rethi posited with suspicious eyes.

‘He’s injured, badly.’ She returned.

‘We should leave him.’ He ignored her own response, flicking his eyes in another direction, away from the one that the wounded man was obstructing.

‘No.’ She replied simply, with steely eyes. Rethi closed his eyes, wishing that he could convince her out of the act, but an argument with her now would be foolish. Rethi nodded concisely, both of them stepping forward towards the body in lockstep, shoulder-to-shoulder.

It only took a few more steps, with each of them being long and purposeful. Alena reached the man and immediately knelt to observe them. With a mere touch, she could tell that they were bleeding out, and awfully close to legitimately dying. She searched around in the man’s body for a moment longer, and other than a few old wounds, nothing seemed out of place.

The man, who wasn’t quite unconscious, lifted a weak hand to clasp around hers, his rough fingers barely able to hold against her wrist as she observed. She paid the touch no attention, instead diverting all over focus into his body as her power pushed into him and flooded over his organs and quickly began to repair them and any damage done to the skin and tissue from the blade.

But as soon as part of the wound had been healed, the man woke from his semi-conscious state and his hand grabbed around her wrist hard. She felt herself jump as she was pulled back to reality, about to tell the man to release his grip, when she looked up to see his eyes.

That moment lasted for an eternity as she looking into them and understood what was coming. The man’s head was tilted up just enough for her to see his wide, terrified eyes, his pupils trained on her with a horrible exactness.

She watched, almost in slow motion, as the man shifted his weight and pulled a long dagger from underneath his side and shoved it towards her with a speed that she’d never be able to react to in time.

She felt that dread, as the dagger drew nearer to her throat, knowing that if that blade cut where it was meant to, then she would die in a matter of moments, far too little for her to heal her own body for the first time with life shifting. She was staring death straight in the face.

Yet, as the dagger drew fatally close, there was a bright flash of light—intense beyond words.

The flash was so intense that it completely blinded her for a few moments, before an accompanying heat blasted past her body at a heat that would have surely seared her skin to a crisp. But it didn’t, instead it was almost comfortable.

When she blinked rapidly, trying to get her vision to return faster, she could hear a gurgling, wet sound. When her eyesight returned, she wished that it had stayed gone. In front of her laid the man, his arm still outstretched weakly, the blade dropped from his fingers to the cobbled streets below. But it was his chest that was the main point of interest. Or the lack of.

A massive hole was blasted into the man’s chest, the flesh simply burnt to char at the hole’s edges. It wasn’t a perfect hole, more in a diamond shape than anything.

The man, knowing he was dead, tried to gurgle something, but Alena couldn’t bear to look into the man’s eyes and wonder what he was trying to say for the rest of her life.

She looked up to Rethi, her horrified featured hidden under her mask, but not in her eyes, and she saw that very same expression in his eyes.

Rethi had killed a man. And it was all her fault.