A healthy man has a thousand dreams. A sick man only has one.

  – Preachings of Saintess Severin, the Mercybound

  “What, exactly, did they feed this guy to crystallise his internal organs?”

  The surgical chamber was a dark, bloody place. Toxic mist seeped through the slats of the boarded-up window and hung in the stale air, but despite the gloom, the stench, and the dread, Gael remained hunched over the bloody operating table like a crooked gargoyle.

  His patient’s chest was already cut open and packed with shrunken, brittle organs. He only had a minute left to save the man, and he was supposed to have given up five minutes ago, but damn if he was gonna give up now.

  “Ventricular access secured!” he barked, his gloved hands moving with manic precision as he threaded dirty glass tubes into the man’s heart, connecting it to a coiled apparatus wheezing at his side. “Cara, adjust the ether pump!” His fingers twisted a valve on the machine, sending a plume of hissing steam into the air. “If the flow stops again, we’ll lose him completely!”

  Blood trickled off the edges of the table. Cara moved to his side without hesitation, her hands steady as she tightened the clamp. “This is insane!” she snapped. “The heart tissue’s already way past necrotic! The elixir won’t take, and you know it—”

  It will take,” he growled back. “We only have to ensure the bonding reaction begins before complete metabolic collapse! The ethervein stimulant will keep his circulatory system active for another thirty seconds, just enough time to finish the infusion!”

  Cara’s face tightened as she held onto the hissing clamp, gritting her teeth. “Thirty seconds ain’t enough! This is reckless even for you, and you know it! Call the operation off!”

  “Nay! Recklessness is the foundation of scientific progress!” He grabbed a glass vial marked with an ‘S’, opened its contents into a hollowed bone spike, and raised it above the chest cavity. “The symbiote elixir will bond with him, and once it takes hold, we shall rewrite all of known human biology! Suction now!”

  His assistant grimaced as she leaned over, kicked the suction bell off the ground, and stabbed it into the man’s open chest with her free hand. Thick, viscous blackblood gurgled into the tube, the machine groaning as it struggled to keep up. The ethervein machine began pumping stabilisation liquid into the man’s necrotic heart.

  His thirty seconds began now.

  “This is mad,” Cara muttered, looking worriedly at the bubbles popping under the man’s skin. “Vitals ain’t looking good. We’re losing him, Gael.”

  “What’s life without a bit of ups and downs?” he said, plunging the bone spike into the man’s lungs and depressing the trigger. The symbiote elixir—the iridescent green liquid—shot out in a fine mist, spreading through the exposed cavity like a living fog.

  For a few seconds, there was only silence save for the faint crackle of the elixir reacting with dead tissue.

  Gael reached for a bottle of alcohol on the surgical tray slowly.

  Then, the man started convulsing violently. The ethervein machine screamed as the readings spiked into chaos. Cara jumped back out of fright as the man practically jolted off his table, but Gael cackled, took a swig of alcohol, and then smashed the empty bottle onto the man’s head, knocking him back down.

  “Yes, yes—come on! Bond, you damn artifice!” he shouted, his voice thick with fervour as he held his bone spike still, watching the mist burn through his gloves, his skin, his flesh underneath. “The elixir will work! Trust me, Cara! It will bond in five, four, three, two—”

  But then the convulsions stopped as abruptly as they’d begun.

  The metal cap popped off the ethervein machine with a loud bang, and steam started hissing out, the old construct finally falling dead.

  Silence fell over the surgical chamber, heavy and final.

  “... Shit.”

  Gael flung the bone spike away. Cara exhaled a heavy breath and dropped her suction bell as well, her jaw tight.

  “It’s over,” she mumbled. “He’s gone.”

  “Not gone,” he muttered, his voice edged with defiance. He leaned forward, shaking the inert shoulder. “Reanimate, you ungrateful husk. You were Cormac Loudain, aged thirty-two, second son of the Loudain Mercantile Company, Beetle Afflicted Frontrunner for the Rot Merchants, and if you still hear me, know that I gave you life! Me! Do you know how much I—”

  “He’s gone,” she repeated, more firmly this time. She reached out, catching his wrist before he could grab another tool. “Enough, Gael. Sit down. We’ve been at this for—”

  “Ambushed by foul machinations!” He jerked his arm free, muttering curses under his breath as he paced the room, kicking a stool into the walls. An awful pain shot through his toes as he groaned, hopping around with his foot in his hands. “It’s the… tools. They’re crude. Primitive. My blood reacted just fine with the elixir to keep it alive while it was in the spike, but once it was actually dripping into the guy's chest, a proper lifeweaver array could’ve stabilised it much better than the shitty ethervein machine—”

  “Stop.” Cara cut him off and strode to the boarded-up window, her boots crunching over broken glass. She grabbed the wooden planks and yanked them off the window frames, nails and all, and pale, hazy sunlight immediately flooded into the room.

  Reality stood stark in the illumination.

  The man on the operating table hadn’t been alive to begin with.

  His skin was waxy and rubbery, and his chest cavity had been hollowed for weeks and stuffed with cheap organs taken from god knows where. He was unmoving, lifeless, and unmistakably dead. After all, Gael had bought him from the Mortuary Sanctum for fifty Marks, and that was supposed to be their food allowance for the rest of the week.

  Nobody but their coffers suffered with the failure of this experiment.

  “... We’re broke now,” Cara said flatly, sighing and crossing her arms as she sat down by the chair next to the window. Gael took the chair next to the operating table, still running his hands through his hair. “You spent the last of our Marks on a corpse. Again. You said he'd still have a curse eating at his body, and that you’d make the symbiote elixir work—”

  “—and it would’ve worked if we had a live patient to test it on—”

  “But it didn’t, because who the hell would want to be on the receiving end of that?” Cara finished, looking him stern in the eye. Somehow, his older sister—dressed in her tattered pharmacist’s robes with a black gas mask strapped over her jaw—still managed to look more menacing than ever. “Every failure brings us closer and closer to the poorhouse. How many times does this make? Twenty-one? Twenty-two?”

  He kicked a glass shard out the window, clicking his tongue. “Twenty-four.”

  “Twenty-five,” she corrected, kicking a glass shard back at him. He slapped it away with his cane. “This ain't working out,” she said. “Running a clinic takes time, equipment, money, and manpower—everything we’re lacking, especially if you’re going to blow our food allowances on corpses without at least telling me about it first.”

  “It can work,” he muttered, readjusting, tightening his Plagueplain Doctor’s mask over his eyes, “and if we can just get it to work once… we’ll win. We’ll run the best clinic in the city. We’ll revolutionise medicine in all of Bharncair.”

  A tense silence fell over the room again as Cara continued staring at him with his mask in his hands, eyes soft with worry.

  “... Maybe it’s time to be more realistic,” she offered gently, leaning forward in her chair. “Look. We’ve been running the clinic for years and we’ve barely had a single returning patient. The ethervein pipes are leaking, the roof’s about to collapse, and we can’t even get proper planks to board up the windows and make the surgical chamber—the surgical chamber—as sterile as it can be. It ain’t getting easier with the Vile growing thicker and thicker every day, either.”

  “So what?”

  “So maybe… it’s time we give up and look for another job.”

  Again with the ‘other job’.

  Gael narrowed his eyes, clenching his throat.

  “You remember the old clinic dad used to run up in the upper city?” he mumbled. “That little botanical garden he had for the kids? The faces of the patients he cured? The clarity of mind he brought to suffering spirits?”

  She smiled wistfully, propping up her jaw in her hands. “I do remember. You know, I didn’t think dad’s patients’ faces would be the first thing you remember about his old clinic—”

  “—also, the sheer chests of coins his patients brought in. Just stop and imagine how loaded we’ll be—”

  “—okay, now that’s more like you—”

  “And I ain’t betraying what he stood for,” he finished, looking sternly back at Cara, and he was certain—without a shadow of doubt in his mind—that his eyes burned bright emerald behind his mask. “We’re close, sis. Scientific triumph is… it's right beyond the veil of the Vile, and I know it. You know it. It ain't about how efficient we are with our tests—the symbiote elixir only needs to work once, and we'll find ourselves in a world of pure bioarcane.”

  Cara was rationally correct, but damnit, she hadn’t been serving as his right hand for the better part of the past decade because she didn’t believe in what they were doing. She’d been even more fervent than him about finishing their pops’ unfinished concoction before their old clinic went tits up, and though pops had never so much as hinted at wanting Gael to complete his life’s work, any half-learned child of a stubborn old man like him would look scientific failure in the eyes, puff their chest out, and say, ‘just one more try’.

  And for how different Cara was from him—the properly educated, moral, rational her to the mud-raised, vile, irrational him—they had shared the same father.

  Those cheeks of hers were propped up by shaking hands, and that was how he knew she was thinking the same thing as him.

  C’mon, sis.

  It's pops’ legacy.

  Just one more try.

  One more.

  “... Fine.” She sighed, standing to her feet with a heavy groan as she threw her braid over her shoulder, tightening her bloody gloves. “One more try. We can afford to keep the clinic open for one more month provided we sell some of our junk at Juno’s market… if we even have anything worthwhile to pawn off, that is.”

  She gestured broadly at the barren, dilapidated clinic outside the room. Gael waved her concerns away as he bounced onto his feet, letting her take care of the corpse disposal and cleanup.

  “We don’t need your makeup set,” he said cheerily, heading straight for her bedroom. “If we’re selling anything, we’re selling those first—”

  “Your collection of bonesaws. Get rid of half of them.”

  “Alrighty.” He pivoted without argument, turning towards the glass shelves by the walls of the room. “What’s Juno's mood like these past few weeks? Good? Bad?”

  “Her third right-hand man just got petrified by a basilisk mosquito. I’d say she’s pretty miffed.”

  “No negotiations, then. I’ll be right back in an hour or two—”

  “And don’t rob the Mortuary Sanctum for another corpse,” she warned, pointing a scalpel at him. “The Repossessors won’t let you off if they catch you again. I hear that Lorcawn bastard managed to snag a few systems for his boys, and now he’s overthrown the old boss to become the new Palm. He’s much less forgiving than Old Murlown, so he’ll actually murk you if he catches you stealing from them, and he’ll take all of your limbs so you don’t even get to roll around in your grave.”

  “Sure, sure—”

  “And take off that shitty mask while you’re outside, will you?” she grumbled, grabbing him by the shoulder as he slid half of his bonesaws into a wooden box. “It’s scary, that thing. The… beak. Switch it out for something else. You know whenever people see that thing—”

  “The mask stays on during trips to the market.” He wiped her hand off, grinning and showing her his beaming white teeth as he turned around, heading for the door. “The symbol of scientific triumph ain’t ever coming off, sis. You best make peace with it.”

  “Whatever,” she muttered, giving him a shove out the door. “But I bet half the reason why nobody ever comes to visit the clinic is because of that mask. You’re piss-scary as hell for a doctor, so either you take it off or you marry a beautiful lady who’ll soften the place up.”

  “Ah, so that's why you wanna keep your makeup kit. You ain't pretty enough for the both of us.”

  He chuckled, plucking his top hat off the coat stand right as she kicked him out the door with an irritated click of her tongue. The kick itself didn’t hurt, but he was drunk, drugged up, and drowsy. He immediately lost his footing and tumbled down the stairs, down into the prayer hall, and then crashed right into the side of the stone altar.

  The cracked, crooked stone head of Saintess Severin leered down at him from atop the altar, eerie as ever. The empty long benches across the dark prayer hall also stared at him, mocking his fall.

  Fuck you want, broken Saint? Wanna fight?

  … Well, no way in hell either of Cara's options was going to happen anytime soon. As if any lady in the city would be willing to take an unlicensed, unregistered doctor squatting in an abandoned church for a man.

  Priorities, Gael, he thought, patting dust off his shoulder as he staggered onto his feet. A cure for death doesn’t wait for a confession of love.

  First, gather the funds.

  Then, complete the symbiote elixir and revolutionize all of medicine.

  Bharncair, the City of Plagues, was like a wound that refused to heal—a sprawling, shadow-choked city of towers and spires festering in its own sickness.

  The people called it the ‘Vile’: a noxious green fog that hung low and thick across the city, smothering the sky and pressing down on the crooked roofs like a suffocating weight. The upper class dogs living in Vharnveil may get to walk and laugh outside without gas masks stealing their breaths, but for those of them down in the pipes, the sight of that golden citadel floating above the center of the city was nothing but a stark reminder of what could be a better life.

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  One without the Vile shoving itself down their throats every hour of the day.

  The slum district in the deepest, darkest, outermost edges of the city was worse. It always was. The narrow alleys twisted like the guts of some dying beast, and the air reeked of rot and sulfur. Shanties leaned into each other like drunkards at a wake, their walls cobbled together with splintered wood, rusting metal, and overgrown shrubs. Even the bioarcanic street lamps were waning and flickering, the fleshy bulbs about to breathe their last.

  A sight for sore eyes as usual.

  With his full box of silver coins, Gael trudged across cobblestones slick with dirty gold acid, humming a cheery beat to himself. He’d gotten what he wanted from Juno, the old hag at the black market: a hundred and fifty Marks for twelve blood-signed collector's edition bonesaws wasn’t bad at all.

  Let’s see… He rummaged his free hand through the box, combing the coins with mad glee on his face. Sixty-five Marks for two meals a day for the both of us will last us a month, which leaves us with eighty-five Marks for experimental prep.

  Twenty goes to fixing the ethervein machine, ten goes to refilling the ethervein stimulants, five for a bundle of twelve bonespikes, and fifty for… one male corpse, aged eighteen to twenty-two, toxicological death by sepsis?

  He tilted his head back in deep thought as he passed by the old tanneries, closed bakeries, and the tailor shop that’d been turned into a hideout for rats and whatever unlucky fool thought they could find shelter inside. Between the poison mist, the never-ending acid rain, and the shadows of Nightspawns lurking behind every gloom and corner of the slums—those magic-blooded wretches—the simple fact was, nobody liked being out on the streets at night.

  It was just him and himself out here, and honestly, he preferred it this way. He’d rather not scrap with anyone with a box of coins in his arms.

  The symbiote elixir doesn’t seem to activate and bond with dead flesh, though, he thought, turning a corner and seeing his rundown church-turned-clinic at the very end of the street. Maybe it ain't worth experimenting with corpses anymore. It ain't like a resurrection elixir or anything to begin with. The ones who’d use it and pay for it are the living, so shouldn’t I be testing on living patients instead?

  Where the hell am I going to get a living patient, though?

  He grimaced as he continued combing through his box of coins, holding up a fistful of dirty silvers in his palm.

  Fifty Marks ain’t anywhere close to enough if I want to buy a volunteering patient. Maybe if I pay a visit to the Lantern Ward, the mudsucking exiled barons will toss me a heinous criminal or two.

  He grumbled under his breath at just the thought of entertaining that idea. Cara had already been mad enough when he brought home his first corpse. No way in undead hell would she let him strap a living man to the surgical table.

  But without a living patient to experiment on, how would he ever figure out if his elixir actually worked or not?

  And what about those Exorcists who made an announcement to the district hall a few weeks ago, saying they’d be sending someone over to deal with the rapidly growing number of Myrmurs round these pipes?

  Normal classless folk like us ain't strong enough to deal with those wretches, but there ain't been any news about the Exorcists since that one announcement. Got all our hopes out for nothing.

  Silver-tongued liars, all of them in the upper city. I'd love to get my hands on a Myrmur carcass. The amount of bioarcanic research data I can get out of it for my elixir would be pheno… menal…

  …

  He paused halfway down the street as he turned his head to the left.

  Acid rain continued trickling down his beak, hissing faintly as the droplets ate into the cobblestone cracks. Bioarcanic bulb lanterns swung overhead, creaking on rusted chains, their weak light barely holding the shadows at bay. The street was quiet. Too quiet. Even the usual scuttling sounds of rats and roaches seemed to have vanished, and that was just absolutely awful.

  Something wasn’t right.

  His eyes narrowed on the alley to his left, a narrow gash between two crumbling buildings. The Vile was thicker there, clinging to the walls like cobwebs, and from deep inside—there was a faint, deliberate scrape of footsteps.

  He slipped a hand into his coat pocket, fingers wrapping around the syringe of self-enhancing drugs. His pulse quickened, but not by much. Not here. Bharncair always had a way of warning people when something was about to go wrong, and if it was just a drunken lad or two, he could stomp them to the curb easily enough.

  “C’mon,” he mumbled, “show yourself.”

  But it wasn’t a man that staggered out of the Vile.

  A middle-aged lady in a grease-streaked brass mask shuffled out, leaning against the brick walls, hunched over with wet, frizzled hair falling before her face.

  Her skin was pale, almost grey, and smeared with grime. Fresh wounds crisscrossed her shivering arms, some of them deep enough to see flesh rotting underneath. A strange, iridescent glow pulsed behind her belly button as well, though fashion statements were strange in this part of town, and that included eating glowing moss that turned people into human torches. It wasn’t exactly uncommon to see people wearing clothes that didn’t cover every inch of their skin even in the acid rain.

  Gael hesitated for only a moment before loosening his grip on the syringe. It was just some poor, sickly lady. Not at all unusual in Bharncair.

  Except he knew the lady.

  “Miss Alba!” he called out, keeping his voice steady as he put his box of coins down, spreading his arms with a joyous laugh as he walked towards the old noodle shop lady with a brass bowl for a mask. “What’s gotten into you? Robbed a place and got wailed on by the Repossessors? Tripped down the wrong lane and dunked your head in the Gulch? Come to the clinic! I’ll give you a checkup for a discount, only twenty Marks an hour, no further charges—”

  The glow in her belly flickered, making Gael freeze.

  He felt he caught a glint of something black, slick and shiny, coiled in the darkness behind her skin.

  And then the glow brightened.

  She jerked forward, and the thing shot out of her belly button as a tendril of flesh that immediately turned into a hooked claw. Too fast. Too sharp.

  He leaned back hard and dodged. The claw just barely missed his face by an inch, whistling past his ears with a wet snap.

  … Oh.

  As he stumbled back and reached for his syringe again, the lady’s body convulsed violently, and the glow in her belly started blinking far too ominously. The thing inside her squeezed its way out the tip of the needle as trickles of flesh and blood, swirling in the air, reforming, coagulating, mandibles buzzing and whirring as it took its real form.

  It was tall and segmented, its glossy carapace glistening with bile. It resembled a human-shaped dragonfly with two legs and two arms, and the woman crumpled as it continued growing in size, stepping away from her body like a living sword exiting its own sheath.

  A fleshy umbilical cord may be connecting its back to the lady’s belly button, but he knew very well the creature wasn’t going to go back in unless it had its fill of human blood.

  The two-metre-tall Myrmur cracked its neck, turning toward him.

  “Well,” he muttered, pulling the syringe from his pocket. “I guess another fistfight in a shady back alley was long overdue.”

  The Myrmur lunged in, its jagged limbs scraping against the stones as it shot toward him with four claws bared, but he didn’t back down. He lunged at its throat, jabbed a syringe into his neck, and his vision widened. It was like a cold dagger stabbing into the back of his head and making the world flash briefly green and red. His muscles electrified, his pain receptors dulled, his blood bubbled in his veins.

  Who the fuck do you think I am?

  With his drug-enhanced body, he grabbed its neck before it could grab his, slamming it down into the ground.

  It tried to get up. Clawed at his feet, swiped at his calves. He sidestepped foot after foot and dodged the slashes, and then he whipped out his folding cane from under his sleeves, uppercutting its jaw with the curved handle to throw it back. When it bounced back almost immediately and pounced at him again, he sucked in a deep breath and headbutted it.

  The metal plates in his top hat shattered its chitin-armoured face.

  While it stumbled back, hissing in pain, he unsheathed his silver blade from his cane and flourished it. Twice. He hadn’t spent hours practising the twirl in front of a mirror to not show it off, after all, so when the Myrmur bounced to the wall, to the other wall, then dashed around him in the blink of an eye to rip out his spine—

  He decapitated it with a backhand swing without even looking, humming as he heard its head falling into a puddle of acid.

  “... A Plagueplain Doctor’s signature trinkets—the plated hat, the pointed crow mask, and the bladed cane. Can’t leave home without ‘em,” he chuckled, sheathing his blade back into his cane. “Well, my unprofessional diagnosis is ‘Myrmur’, and my professional prognosis is ‘I killed it’, so even if you’re unconscious now, I will be sending you the bill in three business days.” He looked down at the lady, brows furrowing as he nudged her shoulder with the tip of his shoe. “Hey. You’re fine now. I murked the thing on my first try. Ain’t never seen a Myrmur before, but I guess they ain't nearly as tough as people say—”

  A claw wrapped around his ankle, and he looked down.

  The decapitated Myrmur had already regenerated half of its head.

  Oh, come on. What the fuck is this shit—

  With a low growl, the beast yanked him off his feet and flung him back. He braced his head as he tumbled into a painful roll out of the alley, across the street, and into a brick wall on the other side.

  Even drugs couldn’t dull that sort of pain.

  He let out a short gasp, wheezing for breath as he tried to crawl up, but the Myrmur was recovering faster by the mouth of the alley. Flesh bubbled and regenerated the rest of its head. The little cuts and tears across its chitin plates knitted themselves close. It must’ve broken an arm on its way down, but it gripped its floppy arm and snapped it straight, regenerating the bone as well.

  He clicked his tongue in irritation.

  Shit.

  Can I not murk it with what I have on hand?

  He stole a glance at his clinic at the end of the street. There were dozens upon dozens of acids and venoms he could try dousing the Myrmur with, but that regeneration factor looked pretty bullshit. There was a good chance it’d just heal through everything he could throw at it. His silver blade meant to mortally wound ghouls didn’t work on its head, either, so maybe he had to damage its heart or something? Douse the acids right on its chest?

  Unlikely.

  The fact was, he didn’t have a Symbiotic System. The Rot Merchants, the Repossessors, and the Gulchers had them, but apart from the three major gangs that ruled this southern ward, most Bharnish didn’t have them. After all, the Vharnish in the upper city would sooner suffocate in the mud than let a dirty, common Bharnish murk a Myrmur without relying on their holier-than-thou help.

  They wanted folk like him to grovel at their feet and beg them for help.

  But… well.

  I don't think this thing will let me run to the clinic and grab a few vials of acid just to test out its regeneration capabilities, anyways.

  Come on, then.

  I ain't dying until I see my symbiote elixir work just once.

  With one hand on the handle of his cane and one hand in his pocket searching for a stronger syringe, he worked his jaw, getting into a battle-ready stance. He’d just have to stomp it to the curb again and again until it could either no longer regenerate or until Cara returned to the clinic from the cleaners’ office. She’d probably notice him kicking up a ruckus and come to help him.

  It'd be great if she also brings a flask of the symbiote elixir with her.

  Dunno why, but I have just the slightest sneaking suspicion that the elixir will help me murk it for good.

  As it pounced across the street to lunge at its throat, he took a step forward. Narrowed his eyes. He unsheathed his blade, gritted his teeth—and then he slipped on a puddle of acid, falling hard onto his back.

  His soles were melting off his shoes.

  … Damn, he thought, watching the Myrmur soar at him. He held his blade and cane up to block, bracing himself. What a lame way to di—

  But out of nowhere once again, someone exploded through the brick wall behind him.

  A girl burst past him and onto the street, shrouded in a thin, wispy mist. Swift and deliberate, she whipped her black umbrella through the air and struck the Myrmur mid-lunge with a sickening crack.

  The force sent the creature slamming into the opposite wall, and it quickly screeched in pain. Unlike when it had its literal head cut off by him, it took one good look at the girl, blinked, and then decided to reel back into the collapsed lady’s belly by its cord.

  Then the exit wound on the belly regenerated immediately with perfectly normal skin, as if a monster hadn’t just crawled out of it.

  For his part, Gael was only blinking, caught between relief and confusion as the mist-shrouded girl landed in front of him. She staggered, her breaths uneven, barely keeping upright.

  She wasn’t wearing a mask, like him.

  “Are you… okay?” she asked, her voice thin but steady as she squinted down at him behind fogged spectacles. “The Myrmur… didn’t touch you, did it?”

  He blinked a few more times for good measure, watching mist hiss off her body like magic.

  Then his mouth caught up with his brain.

  “Fine as day,” he said plainly, patting dust off his own shoulders as he sheathed his blade and pulled himself to his feet. She, however, was not fine. Her complexion was pale, her movements sluggish, and her entire frame seemed to be weighed down by an invisible force. “And you look like absolute shit.”

  The girl took a shaky step towards the crumpled lady at the mouth of the alley, whipped her black umbrella into a briefcase, and then collapsed herself. Gael caught her before she hit the ground. The skin across her forearms was clammy to the touch, and a faint, sickly sheen of poison clung to them like the mist swirling around her.

  She was poisoned.

  “I’ll… be fine,” she mumbled, her words slurring as she struggled to push herself upright.

  “Uh, no,” he said bluntly. “You look about as fine as a rat caught in a roach trap—”

  She raised a hand weakly, showing him the emblem of a two-headed wasp stitched onto the sleeve of her dress. “Symbiote Exorcist,” she muttered. “I’ve got… things under control. I’ve already wounded the Host. The Myrmur needs to regenerate a little inside the Host as well since I hurt it with my bioarcanic blood. It won’t come out for… another hour, so I’ll finish it off before then.”

  But her strength gave out again, and she sagged. Gael’s grip tightened to keep her upright.

  “Yeah, sure, and you’re gonna murk the Myrmur from the ground? Let me tell you, ‘fine’ doesn’t have a face this pale. Come to my clinic.”

  She didn’t respond, her head lolling slightly. Gael frowned, his sharp gaze scanning her for injuries. She was pale, her breathing shallow. Definitely poisoned.

  “Where’s your partner?” he asked slowly, looking around the street for any other signs of life. “I know you Exorcists always work in pairs when you’re hunting Myrmurs. Where's the other guy?”

  Silence.

  Her expression tightened, but she said nothing.

  Ah.

  They're already dead, aren't they?

  She tried to shift again, her body trembling, but he held her firm.

  Between her umbrella-turned-briefcase, the one green and one golden eye, her form-fitting attire, and the bloody cuff dangling off her left ankle, he figured she wasn’t lying about being a Symbiote Exorcist with a Symbiotic System.

  She had to be extremely powerful and loaded—more than well-off enough to pay for everything his clinic needed to survive the coming months—so how could he just let a prospective patient like her slip through his fingers?

  She was it.

  His ticket to scientific triumph.

  “Hold still,” he ordered, prodding her jaw, pressing along her ribs, testing her physical responses. Her response was a weak groan, her head tilting to the side.

  “What... are you doing?” she muttered. “My blood… is poisonous. Anti-Nightspawn. Get away from—”

  “Poison’s already setting in,” he said. “Classic 'Alchemist’s Bane'. Did you get it from the Myrmur? You've got nerve impairment in the temporalis muscle: muscle weakness, saliva pooling, the whole package. You’re slurring your words, and your facial musculature’s already cramping. Symptoms of early-stage hemotoxicity.” He bent lower, eyes narrowing as he checked her limbs. “Your body’s slowing down, but not fast enough for you to just drop dead. Luckily for you, it’s a common poison. I just so happen to have the medicinal herbs to reverse the effects, so all you need to do is chew on them.”

  The girl furrowed her brows. She was too weak to respond, and she was most definitely trying to catch the words in her foggy mind, but it was clear she was losing the thread.

  “I’m not… eating anything… a stranger makes—”

  “Not this one,” he mumbled, tossing out irrelevant herbs as he rummaged through his coat for the fistful of cotton-like herbs he knew he had on hand. “Not this one, not this one, not this one… ah! This one!” He dumped a handful of crushed herbs into his glove and immediately popped them into his mouth. “Now, the proisson’s weakened yer jaw so muchh, y’prob’ly won’t be able t’chew on anythin’, but luckyy for ye ag’ain, there’s an easssy method t’get a slack-jawed lady t’chew on anything.”

  “Whattt are ye… saying?” she slurred back, her breaths quickening, her mouth barely able to form words. “Stahp… talkin… while chewin’... ‘cause ah can’t… hear ye.”

  He kept chewing, but he bit his tongue hard while he was at it. She was much further along the path of death than he thought if her speech was already that slurred, so if he fed her the medicinal herbs the ‘normal’ way, there was a very real chance she’d either spit it out or choke on it.

  There was one way to make sure she wouldn’t spit it out, though.

  “I’m Gael Halloway, your friendly neighbourhood doctor,” he said, rolling the chewed up herbs into a ball with his tongue as he grabbed her chin, leaning in with a grin. “What’s your name?”

  The girl hesitated to respond. She probably wasn’t in the right frame of mind to think anymore, but she stared into his glass lenses, head tilted back so his beak wouldn’t poke out her outs, and then after a few seconds, her emerald eyes seemed to haze over with fatigue.

  “Maeve,” she whispered. “I’m … Maeve Valcieran, F-Rank Wretch-Class Exorcist, sent here to—”

  But before she could finish her sentence, he nudged his mask off a little to the side and pressed his lips to hers, feeding her his ball of herbs.

  Then the bloody cuff dangling off her left ankle snapped onto his right ankle, binding them together, and a black box popped up next to their faces with a simple message.

  [Blood to blood contact established]

  [Host is designated as ‘Gael’. Hunter is designated as ‘Maeve’]

  [Beginning bioarcanic integration for Host and Hunter]

  [Estimated time remaining: Thirty minutes]

  [Please sever one of your ankles if you do not wish to proceed with integration]

  Gael didn’t break away from the kiss as he stared at the message, blinking pointedly.

  But Maeve immediately snatched up his walking cane and unsheathed his blade.