The Exorcist Doctor

Chapter 155 - A Raven Laughs // An Exorcist Eats

Jin watched as Maeve descended from the night sky like a falling star, riding her opened umbrella down, and in that instant, she didn’t look anything like the woman he usually saw trailing half a step behind Gael’s chaos with a patient face and a clean dress.

He saw the lower half of her Raven mask cut through the dark—and then she came down the rest of the way, driving her umbrella straight down into one of the Blight-Class Myrmur’s heads.

The impact made the ground lurch. Her umbrella punched through the Myrmur’s skull and buried it into the floor, the force of it sending cracks spiderwebbing across the stone in all directions. The other three Myrmurs reeled and flinched, holding up their arms to brace against the wind, and even Jin struggled to see for a moment as dust and toxic blood splashed everywhere.

Maeve simply stood on her umbrella for half a heartbeat longer, looking down at him with a small frown.

“Don’t just lie there,” she said. “It’s dangerous.”

… I know.

He almost laughed. The whole facility was thick with toxic mist, half the wine barrels were shattered, his right arm was broken, and the Myrmur she’d impaled wasn’t dead yet. Its heart wasn’t destroyed. The moment it regenerated and tried to rise, Maeve vaulted off its head with her umbrella, flipping mid-air and landing beside him while he struggled onto his feet.

“You okay?” she asked, sparing him a cursory glance.

“I’m… fine,” he grumbled, clutching his right arm. “Nothing a heal from Vivienne can’t fix.”

And while the impaled Myrmur dragged itself to its feet, slowly regenerating its crushed skull and eyes and chitin plates, the other three Myrmurs standing around them visibly hesitated. Of course they did. They recognized the scent of another Exorcist Hunter, and unlike him, Maeve wasn’t detached from her partner. Her bloodshackle trailed straight up through the hole in the ceiling and led somewhere he couldn’t see, but being connected meant she could use her Art a whole lot more than he could—and the Myrmurs weren’t going to take any risks with two Hunters in the same room.

Instead of rushing the two of them together, all four Myrmurs immediately broke towards the surviving barrels. Thick claws hooked under wooden lids and ripped them apart, splitting staves, hoops, and spilling wine across the floor in red floods.

While Maeve frowned—and likely checked their statuses for more information—they bent greedily and began drinking from the fermenting wine, forcing more glowing green bulbs to swell on their backs. Some of them popped instantly, spreading clouds of intensely toxic mist across the room that made him choke and gag even through his mask. Even a shallow breath hurt his throat now like a hot edge down his throat.

But Maeve seemed entirely unimpressed. While he staggered and leaned against the barrel behind him, she remained perfectly still in the thick of it, one hand on her umbrella.

Does she have higher levels in her spiracle mutation than me?

How’s she so used to this?

She should be blinking through tears and blood and smoke. Instead, she glanced back at him before eyeing the barrel he was leaning against.

“Keep holding onto that thing, okay?”

Then he saw her thumb moving, and he tightened his two-handed grip on his barrel when she began flicking a sequence of switches on her umbrella’s shaft.

The umbrella began to spin.

At first it was little more than a whirring blur, but then the speed built fast, faster, and even faster. The canopy became a dark circle as she raised her umbrella over her head, and the air around it started to pull. Jin felt the first drag of it immediately. The toxic mist enveloping the facility quickly changed directions. Loose wooden splinters began sliding across the floor. Even puddles of wine lifted in thin swirls as the whirlwind started to take shape.

A whirlwind.

It churned around from the floor to the tip of her raised umbrella, gathering the toxic mist into itself. The recoil from the umbrella fought her viciously. Tension built in her arms and shoulders as she locked her feet, steadied her stance, and swirled her umbrella over her head with just enough force that she could control it, tame it, but not let it run wild. Not yet. However many points she’d put into increasing her grip strength mutation, it was all showing with the controlled howling in his ears and the building wind pressure in the facility.

The Myrmurs couldn't help but notice as well. All four of them stopped drinking and releasing toxic mist into the air the moment her whirlwind started to churn, but it wasn’t until even the wooden debris and loose metal parts began swirling around her that they seemed to realize this was more serious than they’d thought.

Maeve was stronger than they’d thought.

“Arnell really outdid himself with this upgrade!” she shouted, thumbing a second button on her handle. “It takes a long time to wind this attack up, though, so thanks for not moving at all!”

The swirling current immediately became a sucking current, and all the toxic mist she’d been churning around her began rushing into the umbrella’s handle. Jin gritted his teeth as he struggled to hold onto his barrel, the pressure sucking him in as well, but before he knew it—all of the toxic mist in the facility was cleared, and there wasn’t even a tinge of green in the air.

… Save for the bright green glow of the shaking, trembling, thrumming umbrella in her hands, of course.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

The Myrmurs broke. Instinct finally outran aggression. Their claws scrambled for footing as they tried to flee out the front gates at the very end of the facility, and for all their strength, the panic in them was real and ugly. Maeve only laughed as she reared her umbrella back with both hands like she was preparing to thrust a blade.

“I’m pretty sure he’s also got them handled on the other side, but even if he hasn’t…” she said cheerily, “I’ll just keep killing you until you die.”

Then she drove her umbrella forward, and the gathered mist shot out the tip in a single, compressed beam so violent Jin felt the rumble in his ears and teeth.

Behind a toppled table, Vivi crouched with her rifle huggled close to her chest as she watched Gael fistfight the four manic Myrmur Hosts like he’d wandered onto the wrong stage play—and still decided to enjoy himself anyways,

Nothing about it made sense.

He had no proper stance. No visible caution. There was zero respect for fact that the fat husband, wife, and two children were all swinging filleting knives and jagged dining blades at his throat with every clear intention of cutting him open, because he was drunk off his skull. His top hat was crooked, cane in one hand and his coat flaring as he moved in a chaos of blocks, shoulder-checks, sudden punches, bursts of ugly laughter.

The fat husband rushed him, shrieking with his mask halfway off and both arms raised high. Gael met him by simply knocking one blade aside with the hooked handle of his cane, taking the second hit directly on the plated sleeve of his coat, and then smashing his forehead into the man’s face hard enough to send him staggering into the circle bar. Then the wife came in from the side. Gael spun, half-stumbled, half-danced out of the way, and buried a punch into her jaw that sent her reeling into a table. Then one of the children launched himself onto Gael’s back and started stabbing uselessly at the armored layers beneath his collar. Gael barked out a laugh, grabbed the child by the scruff, and flung him across the floor into a pile of shattered dishes.

He shouldn’t be looking so casual. He bludgeoned. He absorbed every hit. He let knives glance off his armored coat and he blocked blades with the shaft of his cane. And for all the grinning he was doing after each drunken exchange, the worst of all—the worst of all—was that Vivi knew he was holding back.

She’d seen enough of him by now to understand that much. He was stronger than this. Faster than this. If he’d wanted to, he could’ve made this little brawl end in seconds the moment he entered the room.

But he cared about not killing the mad Myrmur Hosts, which made her stomach knot.

A Raven cared.

What kind of Raven—drunk and absolutely drugged—looked at four Myrmur Hosts trying to butcher him and felt their lives still mattered enough to inconvenience himself for them?

… So that’s the difference.

He’s him, and I’m…

The husband lunged. Gael slipped around the charge to let the man smash head-first into the bar counter, then drove an uppercut under the wife’s chin so hard her whole body left the floor. She went up with a strangled gasp and came down on the other end of the circle bar, cracking several bottles under her back. The last two children also came at him swinging, so he promptly stepped back and tripped both of them over, chuckling under his breath.

“Alright,” he muttered. “Time’s up. I’m about to puke.”

And with a quick flourish, he produced four syringes from inside his coat filled with glowing, iridescent liquid. Before Vivi could say anything, he flicked his wrist and sent them flying one after another, striking each of the downed Hosts in the neck. Said iridescent liquid emptied into them instantly, making all of them convulse.

Vivi knew that tremor. The Myrmur hearts inside them were collapsing because of the symbiote elixir—but only then did her own heart finally kick hard.

Wait.

“Um—” Her throat tightened. “Um, are you not going to check if they’re artificial Myrmur Hosts first?”

Gael glanced back at her, eyes glassy behind those fogged lenses. She gulped at the sight of them—she couldn’t tell if he was really even looking at her—but she managed to muster her courage and take another deep breath anyways.

“If they are, then… then they’ll have bombs inside them. Won’t the bombs explode if they detect that the Myrmur hearts are destroyed?”

Gael kept staring.

Then his lenses blinked. A function she didn’t even know existed.

“Oh shit,” he said. “I forgot.”

He clawed into his coat for his exoparasitic flower vials and dropped to his knees immediately, grumbling under his breath as he made small incisions at the back of each Host’s neck before sticking the flowers in. His hands were steady despite everything else about him suggesting he was panicking, and that, more than anything, made him more frightening than ever.

But the flower operations didn’t take him long at all, so once the final flower began to take root on the fat husband’s neck, he collapsed against the side of the bar counter with a huge sigh, one knee up, cane laid across his lap.

“Thanks for the reminder,” he said, grinning at her. “Would’ve been terrible if they just blew up, huh?”

Before she could answer, the restaurant’s front entrance banged open again. This time, several three-faced men in neat dark suits rushed inside, small pistols already drawn.

But Gael looked over at them and sighed once more.

“You lot are tardy. I already dealt with it.”

The masked men slowed, taking in the wrecked room, the broken bar, the stunned patrons, and the downed Hosts convulsing under the flowers. Most of them quickly lowered their pistols by a fraction.

“Sorry about the damages, though.” Gael waved a hand at the restaurant around him. “I’ll pay for it. In the meantime…”

Gael turned his head back towards her and grinned again.

Vivi hugged her rifle tighter and tried very hard not to shudder.

Jin was still processing what’d just happened.

Half the facility behind Maeve was gone. Broken barrels bled wine into the cracked floor and timber leaned at unsafe angles. The absolute reek of crushed fruit, toxic mist, mud-blood, and burned chitin all mixed together in the air and hung thickly, but more importantly, the four Blight-Class Myrmur carcasses lay in the back of the facility where Maeve’s attack had completely demolished down. Now they were steaming, melting, and hissing faintly as their regeneration finally failed them.

Somewhere out there, their hearts were destroyed. Maeve took their inability to get up as her sign to fold her umbrella back into its briefcase form, and then she looked back at Jin, eyes gleaming.

“I ran into the Three-Faces on my way here, and they told me they made a deal with you or something. Apparently they’ll handle all the cleanup related to Myrmur exorcisms from now on?” she said. “In that case, how about we grab some dinner? I’m still starving.”

Jin stared at her.

That wasn’t an actual question she wanted an answer to.