Gael saw the knife flying at him in slow motion.
His perception had long since ceased obeying common biology. The blade seed to crawl towards him, gleaming as if the Saintess herself had dipped it in mockery—so he tilted his head, lips curling back, and bit down.
The knife shattered between his teeth, and then he spat out the shards, grimacing at the tallic taste.
Whew.
It’s been a while since I chewed a knife.
Maeve didn’t waste ti. She imdiately swung her umbrella down and pinned the man by the chest, driving him flatter against the pipe, but he still thrashed, coughing, wrists flailing with a surprising amount of strength for soone who’d just had a Blight-Class Myrmur removed from him.
Gael squatted, spat out one last shard, and squinted at him. “Don’t do that again. I’m a doctor, not a cutlery sharpener.”
The man’s pupils darted wildly. His breath ca in hoarse, wet gulps, but the fury in his face as he glared at Gael was unmistakable.
Maeve pressed him down harder with her umbrella. “Stay down. You’re badly hurt. You shouldn’t even be moving—”
“Why did you save ?” the man hissed, eyes wet, voice breaking. “You can’t save . I wasn’t… I wasn’t ant to be saved. He told… he told to co down here, to bring ruin, and I—”
“Told by who?” Gael narrowed his eyes, and his voice lost its humor for a mont as he leaned forward. “Did soone put the Myrmur in you?”
The man’s teeth rattled together. “I… can’t. I can’t say.”
“You can,” Gael countered, leaning closer. “And you will. I know a Raven’s been running around putting Blight-Class Myrmurs in poor sods like you, but I don’t know which one. What’s their number? What’s their rank?”
The man’s head jerked side to side violently, spit flecking his chin. “I can’t! If I say anything, he’ll… they’ll kill my family. My wife. My daughter. They’ll cut them to pieces. They’ll—”
Gael’s jaw twitched. “And if you don’t say, then the Saintess already has your family in the ground. You think your silence makes you clean? If you were supposed to die down here, then they would’ve killed your family after you were dead anyways. You might as well—”
“It’s your fault.” The man’s eyes burned with sudden hate. “All of it. If you hadn’t… if you hadn’t brewed your cursed elixir—hadn’t rattled the hornet’s nest—none of us would be here. He wouldn’t have accelerated his experints. None of this would’ve…”
Then he snapped his jaw shut, as if realizing he’d said too much already, and Gael froze for a fraction of a second before he heard it.
A faint click.
The sound of a pin leaving its bomb.
… Oh shit.
The man’s body glowed from within, orange fissures running across his flesh and skin like veins filled with molten light.
His convulsions beca spasms, and the heat rising off him stank of sulfur and char.
Maeve’s face blanched. She started to pull her umbrella back, but Gael had already seized her by the waist and yanked her backs, twisting his coat around her like a shroud.
The glow swelled, pulsing brighter and brighter. The man’s eyes bled light as if his skull had beco a lantern, and he arched his back, teeth clenched, screaming through his spasms.
He’s too close.
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The blast radius is gonna pulp us.
He hugged Maeve tight against his chest, coat drawn tight, but just as the air warped and the man’s body trembled on the edge of detonation—a voice from above thundered down the shaft.
“Get down!”
… As if he wasn’t already doing that. But making him and Maeve as small as possible didn’t an he didn’t see a crimson tide of blood shooting down from high above, slamming into the convulsing man.
In an instant, the blood clung. Hardened. Turned into a mud-like mound, thick and solid, smothering the glow beneath it.
Then the man exploded.
The shaft roared, air buckled, and the pipe beneath them jolted like a drumskin. A dull boom rolled through Gael’s bones, but it was heavily muted by the mound of mud, and the force that should’ve torn at least his coat to ash instead ca as little more than a bruising shove of air.
His heart stuttered once, twice.
And when the dust cleared—the phantom thunder muttering and dissipating through the pipes—both of them turned around slowly.
The mud heap that had been the man stead like a fresh-baked sin.
Then—thwip.
A steel grappling hook shot into the mud mound. The line went taut, rippled, and began to reel. Clay cracked. The mud cap peeled. And up and up ca a prize no jeweller would put on display: a golden ring that’d survived the blast.
Maeve flinched. Gael didn’t. He only raised his gaze.
Perched on a higher pipe like crows in a belfry were two figures. One—a man—wore talworker’s overalls with thin plates buckled over his knees, elbows, and knuckles. His iron gas mask was sharp with jagged edges, his hair was dark and scruffy enough to be its own geography, but his eyes—sharp, tired, and listless—studied Gael with the resigned focus of soone who’d killed, and would kill again.
He held no obvious weapon… unless one counted the gauntlet on his raised palm. Steam ghosted from tubes embedded onto the knuckles.
Does he directly shoot his blood out from those tubes?
What a strange weapon.
Beside the man stood a lady. A pretty lady with long and flowy golden hair tucked under a sensible hood, the rest of her dressed like a portrait of a princess that’d lost its museum and fallen into a sewer. Fine silk and subtle embroidery. Cotton shoes that’d never ant to et a pipe. A beautiful golden gas mask carved with spiderweb patterns. Contrary to her noble appearance, though, she held a handso rifle with a carved stock, which was absolutely the wrong type of weapon for the cramped and enclosed underworks.
Her posture scread nerves. She hovered close to the man’s shoulde, and at their ankles…
Gael raised a brow.
A chain.
Symbiote Exorcists.
The man’s the Hunter, and the lady’s the… Host?
They looked a strange pair, but Gael had seen stranger. He’d lived stranger—
“That man was a Myrmur Host I've been hunting for days,” the man suddenly shouted. “Thank you for doing the work of breaking him, but—” He yanked the grappling line attached to his lady’s rifle taut and pulled off the golden ring, dangling it for Gael and Maeve to see. “The bounty's mine. I'll claim the pay from the Exorcists. As thanks, you two have until nightfall to get the hell out of my territory.”
Gael’s neck twitched like a crow shaking off rain.
“Your territory?” His voice pitched upwards into a mockery of incredulity. “What in the Saintess’ septic lungs are you talking about? This part of the pipes is my territory.”
The young man narrowed his eyes, tired and unimpressed. “This is under Ironwych. My turf.”
“We’re not under Ironwych, dipshit.” Abruptly, Gael lunged into Maeve’s dress pocket and yanked out a massive, folded parchnt. He snapped the map open, one page after another, and held it up for the man to see. “We’re under Blightmarch. My turf. How about you take your little blood-hose trick and your doll-faced rifle-maiden and piss off by sunset, huh?”
The man frowned. His eyes rolled up to the back of his head as if in deep thought, but the young lady beside him had more common sense than Gael had thought, because she quickly tugged at the man’s sleeve, anxious as a rabbit in a slaughterhouse. Even her hood couldn’t hide the nervous twitch of her lips.
“Let’s just leave,” she urged softly. “We probably made a mistake sowhere. We don’t have to fight here, do we?”
For a mont, the man’s stare remained locked onto Gael’s across the gulf, sharp and smoldering.
Then, with a short exhale, he let the lady pull him back.
As they lted into the shadows above, ready to vanish into the pipeworks, Maeve scowled.
“Wait,” she called out. “You. Lady in the hood. Aren’t you—”
But she never finished her sentence. The pair of Exorcists were gone.
Imdiately afterwards, the five Gulchers peered cautiously down from the edge of an overhead pipe, all of them nodding gratefully down at Gael. It seed as though they didn’t care whether or not the man survived, only that the Blight-Class Myrmur was dealt with—so they disappeared quickly after as well.
Gael could only assu they now owed him a favor.
“... What now?” Maeve asked, turning to Gael with a quiet and troubled look.
For his part, he didn’t answer.
His eyes stayed on the mud-sared ruin where the man had been.
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