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Eldritch Horror? No, I'm A Doctor
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Ren pulled them both inside before either of them finished the sentence.
He checked the street in both directions, saw nothing, and closed the door. The building was bare. No furniture, no equipment, just floor and walls and the early morning grey coming through the window. He turned to face them.
"Talk," he said.
Axel talked fast. He had seen a classified operation file two hours ago, flagged for Level Seven clearance, his name on the authorized list because of his rank. He had not been meant to see it until the morning briefing. He had seen it early because he could not sleep. The operation was active. Two assets, both Legendary rank. Objective: eliminate Phenomenon-08. Timeline: before the subject could leave the Empire's borders.
"Two," Nox said.
"Two," Axel confirmed.
"Fuck," Nox said. Then: "Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck."
He pressed his hand flat against the wall and thought about this for a second.
"Has General Malvick already been here?" Axel asked.
"Yes. Three hours ago."
"Fuck," Steven said.
"Shit," Axel said.
"Shit, shit, shit."
"Then we are completely finished. I told you we shouldn't come. I said that. I said exactly that on the way over." Steven said
"And what was the alternative?" Axel said, his voice going hard.
"Let Dr. Nox die? He saved our lives. He saved two hundred and thirteen soldiers. Even a dog knows loyalty. I am not going to stand there and do nothing because it is the convenient option."
Steven opened his mouth. Closed it. Let out a long, slow breath through his nose. "That is why I came too, Major General. I just wanted to say it out loud once before everything goes sideways." He looked at the ceiling. "Haaaa."
Nox looked between them. "Are they outside right now?"
"One hundred percent," Axel said.
Steven looked at Axel. "We are going to military prison for this."
"You are being optimistic," Axel said.
"I have worked under General Malvick for six years. I know how he thinks. Fifty percent chance he kills us outright." He said it with the flatness of someone making a realistic assessment, not a dramatic one.
"We should be prepared for that."
"Prepared how," Steven said.
"I have no idea," Axel said.
Nox looked at both of them. They were standing in a bare room in civilian clothes at half past five in the morning, having just told him that two Legendary-rank hunters were waiting outside to kill him, and they had come here anyway. He did not have the right words for what that was, so he did not try to find them.
"Thank you," he said. "Both of you. You did not have to do this."
"Please flee before I lose my nerve," Axel said.
"There is a Legendary-rank hunter outside. Two of them. I am a Mythical-rank soldier and I am genuinely considering the structural integrity of this wall as a hiding option. Please go."
Nox turned to the wall, reached out to the System.
Store the clinic.
Confirmed. Initiating—
The building around them folded inward. It took less than thirty seconds, the walls thinning and dissolving into the inventory feed, the floor lifting, the structure compressing itself out of physical existence from the outside in until the four of them were standing on bare ground in a gap between buildings where a structure used to be, the early morning sky open above them.
Storage complete.
"Alright," Nox said. "Move. Now."
He turned toward the street.
The blast hit before he finished turning.
Something came from above at a speed that left no gap between its arrival and the impact. The force hit the ground where they had been standing and spread outward in a concussive wave, and Ren felt it as a wall of air that lifted him off his feet and carried him backward through open space, over the rubble of what had been the adjacent building, and into the outer wall of the structure across the street. He hit stone, fell, caught himself before the ground, and landed in a crouch in the debris.
He looked up.
The building they had been standing in was partially collapsed on one side, the impact crater still smoking. Something had come from above at a speed that left no time to react.
He looked at the street.
Steven was in the street.
The impact had been direct, something moving fast enough that the human body did not survive the encounter in any recognizable form.
Steven's torso had been driven into the road surface hard enough to crack the stone underneath. What was left of his chest cavity was open, the ribs displaced outward, organs visible through the wreckage of clothing and flesh. His left arm was three meters from the rest of him.
His head had rolled to the base of the building wall, the eyepatch still on, the blue glow of Vorthak's eye already dimming as whatever energy held it active faded with its host. His face was intact. He looked almost calm, which was the worst part of it, his expression caught in the moment before he understood what had hit him.
Ren looked at it for the second and a half that he could afford to look at it, and then he stopped looking at it, because there was nothing in that street he could repair and nothing useful that came from standing there.
Axel was still alive. Mythical rank had saved him from immediate death but nothing else. He was on his knees in the rubble, one arm hanging at the wrong angle, something in his torso clearly broken from the pressure wave. He was coughing blood into the stone. Still breathing, but barely.
Malvick Siven landed in front of him.
He reached down and took Axel by the throat, lifting him without particular effort. Axel's feet left the ground. He did not struggle. He was barely conscious.
"You took an oath," Malvick said, his voice carrying the same quiet it always carried. There was no anger in it, which somehow made it worse.
"You swore loyalty to the Azareth Empire and to the chain of command. You swore it when you were commissioned and again when you were promoted. You knew what those oaths meant." He looked at Axel with the expression of a man who is not surprised, only settling an account.
"What the Empire does to a traitor, Major General, is not something I take pleasure in. But it is something I am authorized to complete."
"Dr. Nox," Axel said. His voice was rough and small. He turned his head toward where Ren was standing in the rubble across the street, still in the plague doctor mask, still alive. "Run."
Malvick did not look toward Ren.
Ren ran.
He moved along the building line and dropped into the nearest sewer access point, pulling the grate closed above him and going down into the dark. The system under this district was old, wide enough to move through at speed, the water low. He ran.
Steven is dead, he thought, and then pushed it out of the front of his mind because if he let it in fully right now he would stop moving and stopping moving was not an option.
He could not die here. Steven had not come to that doorway at half past five in the morning so that Ren could stop in a sewer and grieve. He ran.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
His footfalls echoed in the tunnel. He counted distance by the sound of it. Two hundred meters. Three hundred. The sewer forked and he went left toward the industrial district, toward the main outlet, toward anything that meant open ground and a direction he could actually move in.
Then the floor shifted.
Shifted, the way a floor shifts when the thing it is resting on is no longer resting on anything.
Ren slowed without meaning to and looked down at his feet.
The ground was moving. Floating. He could feel it in his legs, the micro-instability of something solid that had become unmoored.
He looked up.
The ceiling of the sewer tunnel tore open from above, a ragged line of brick and concrete peeling back as if something had reached down and opened it like a lid. Grey morning light poured in. Then more ceiling tore away, and more, and more, the entire block of sewer infrastructure coming apart in sections above him.
He came out of the access hole involuntarily as the section of tunnel he was standing in lifted, dragged upward with the rest of the infrastructure, and he hit open air forty meters up before he caught himself and looked at what was happening.
The entire sewer network for two city blocks was in the air.
Hundreds of meters of brick tunnels, water pipes, junction chambers, access shafts, all of it suspended above the rooftops, slowly rotating, water raining down from the broken pipes in long silver lines. The city below was a sudden river where the street level used to be dry. People were running. The sounds of the district waking up to something wrong were already starting.
In the sky, higher up, Gregory Hood stood with his hands at his sides. The scripture was fully deployed behind him, the golden rings enormous at this distance, casting light across the suspended infrastructure below him. His eyes were solid gold. He was looking down at the floating wreckage of the sewer system with an expression of mild interest, the way a person looks at something they have done that turned out roughly as expected.
He was smiling.
Ren looked at the floating sewer block beneath him and at the scripture rotating in the sky above him, and at the distance between where he was and any ground that was not currently suspended in the air.
"They are absolutely insane," he said.
The water from the broken pipes kept falling, a slow rain of sewer water over the rooftops below.
He had to move.