The Exorcist Doctor

Chapter 158 - A Surgeon's Boredom // Milkweed Heart

It took an entire night and a half for Gael to finish operating on every Myrmur Host Jin and Vivi had sent to their hotel room. Thankfully, the Three-Faces had given them the hotel rooms of all hotel rooms: it was the two-floor penthouse corner room in the Grand Bleakhearth Hotel, with about a dozen windows overlooking the busiest street in the western ward down below. ‘Luxurious’ wouldn’t even begin to cover it. There were eight separate bedrooms, eight bathrooms for each bedroom, two kitchens, golden statuettes in alcoves in the walls, chandeliers with ever-glowing bioarcanic lanterns, and about six custom-made sofas scattered all across the giant living room.

Granted, none of them had really spent much time in the hotel since they arrived a few days ago. Jin and Vivi only returned to sleep after hunting Myrmurs, Liorin and Evelyn had apparently camped outside in some forest, Fergal and Cara had stayed in the Mothlight Theatre for the most part, while Gael and Maeve had dozed through the past few nights in the picturehouse’s reclined seats.

If Gael had known their hotel room was actually this luxurious, maybe he would’ve stayed in it more. Alas, all of them were back here now, ready to move on with the next stage of their investigations.

… Eh.

More like ‘Gael does all the hard work and everyone else just fucks around’.

Jin and Vivi, having reluctantly reconnected their bloodshackles, currently sat on one of the long sofas near the balcony. Today was the first day they didn’t go out to hunt Myrmurs because Jin needed time to detoxify his toxic blood, and Vivi needed to recover from physical exhaustion, but that didn’t mean either of them talked to each other. They’d just been sitting there in silence, half-awake, half-asleep.

At the dining table beside them, Fergal and Cara had colonized the entire surface with ledgers, loose notes, and gang operation books. It seemed they were still discussing how to move forward with the Saint’s Hands deal with the Three-Faces. Then, nearby on the beanbag chairs, Liorin and Evelyn were lounging on their backs, arguing and bickering over some of the horror chronicles Maeve had brought back from one of their movie-adjacent excursions.

Gael ignored all of them.

Up front, at the center of the living room, he sat backwards on a chair before the main sofa. His arms draped over the back of the chair, and his chin rested there as well, tired from keeping his head lifted already. Maeve sat beside him properly—of course she did—but a single glance at the listless scribbles in the notebook in her hands made it pretty obvious she was tired too.

Still, once she finished documenting everything she needed to, she turned to him and nodded.

He inhaled.

The shout carried through the room, bounced off walls, and summoned the next victim—the next guest—from the hallway outside.

Over the past few days, Jin and Vivi had managed to save thirty-two Myrmur Hosts. Of those, only ten had turned out to be artificial Myrmur Hosts with bombs inside them, all of which Gael had already surgically removed over the past day. The rest of the twenty-two were ordinary Myrmur Hosts who caught their parasites the ‘normal’ way. Even so, he was calling every last one of them in one by one for interrogation, because there was always still a chance that they’d encountered something a bit more than normal.

But he was on his fourteenth interrogation for the night, and he was bored.

As the next Host shuffled into the room looking hollow-eyed and exhausted, Gael directed him to sit on the sofa and sighed.

“Where’d you get the Myrmur?” he asked for the fifteenth time tonight.

“No idea,” the man said weakly.

“You had a bomb inside you, my man. Think harder.”

“I-I don’t know.”

After a few more questions, Gael kicked the man out of the room, gave Maeve some time to document all of the answers, and called in the next.

“Did you attend any unusual events, drink anything strange, kiss anyone suspicious, buy cursed wine, eat illegal meat, take medicine from a smiling man in an alley, or wake up one morning with a bug in your chest and a sense of spiritual decline?” Gael asked, sighing again.

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“No, sir, I… I don’t know,” the pale woman with shaking hands said.

The next.

“Did you see anything suspicious between two weeks past and the last week, which was the most likely time period you contracted the parasite?”

“I dunno.”

The next.

“I just got sick, sir.”

The next.

“I thought it was indigestion for a while, but then—”

The next.

“Hesham, my dog, just died, so I thought—”

Gael kicked his twentieth victim out of the room with a grumble. It took this one a little longer than usual to enter the room, so while he listened to the shuffling and bumbling outside the door, he slammed his forehead into the back of his chair.

“... You know what? I really am gonna get bored to death,” he muttered. Then he snapped his head upright, stood, and pointed at Fergal and Cara in the back. “You interrogate them for me. If anybody says anything remotely interesting, holler.”

Fergal looked up from his operation logs and frowned. Cara glowered at him, on the other hand, and it sent a shiver down his spine.

“We’re busy,” she said slowly.

“So am I,” he replied, tapping his hand. “I’m preserving my genius from erosion.”

“The guests don’t know us,” Fergal added.

“They don’t know me either. I wear a bird on my face.”

The next Host chose that moment to walk in, so Gael took it as divine timing, grabbed Maeve’s hand, and yanked her to the kitchen before Cara and Fergal could argue any further.

“Excellent! Perfect! Splendid! Sis, Fergal, he’s all yours.”

Cara probably shot him a murderous look, but not seeing it meant it wasn’t real, so he escaped into the kitchen with Maeve before either of them could protest.

The penthouse kitchen was larger than most Blightmarch kitchens—and definitely cleaner than all of them. The counters were vast, polished, and currently dominated by the butchered remains of the four Blight-Class Myrmurs Maeve had killed the night before. Their meat—what the Three-Faces had neatly harvested and portioned for them—was still cooking in the back on a low boil, filling part of the suite with a heavy, gamey smell.

But the meat didn’t interest him. The raw remains did. Four giant armored torsos, split down their lengths, were laid out across the main countertop. The Three-Faces had cleaned them thoroughly as well, to their credit. The organs were trimmed, the sludge was washed out, and all the other obvious refuse was removed. Still, Maeve stepped in behind him and grimaced faintly as the smell hit her more directly.

“Saintess… they still smell strong.” She pinched the bridge of her nose. “Must’ve been all the wine they drank before dying.”

He drifted closer to the armored torsos with a grin already spreading across his face. The sight of a dissectable mystery always improved his posture, so he reached out and tapped a section of the chitin with two fingers.

“What were they called again?” he murmured. “Milkweed bugs?”

Maeve nodded. “They can drink wine and convert the toxicity into glowing bulbs on their backs. The bulbs boost their physicality, but they can also detonate them into toxic mist for a lot of area denial.”

“Very interesting.” He pressed his fingers into one split torso, feeling for any resistance, layering, or hidden structure. The butchering by the Three-Faces was competent, but competent and thorough weren’t the same thing. Most people cut bugs open looking for meat. He was looking for something else entirely. “In that case, there’s got to be… ah!”

He found a seam. He wedged his fingers in and tried to pry the torso further apart, but he wasn’t strong enough, so he planted his boots, bared his teeth, and hauled even harder.

Still not enough.

“Dearest wife,” he wheezed. “Grab the other side and stop admiring my efforts from a safe distance.”

She scowled. “I’m not admiring you.”

“Then make yourself useful.”

She sighed, stepped up beside him, and braced both gloved hands against the other half. Together they pulled. The armored torso resisted at first, but Maeve's grip strength, he had to admit, was orders of magnitude above his, so with a wet crack and a collapsing lurch, the torso split down in half.

A rush of inner sludge, ruptured membranes, and useless biomaterial spilled out across the counter in one revolting heap. Maeve recoiled at once, making a disgusted sound.

“Ugh. Why’d you–”

Gael, however, immediately jammed one hand elbow-deep into the spilling mess and searched around the inside of the torso. Warm tissue slid between his fingers. Filaments snapped and some gelatinous sac burst against his wrist, making Maeve make another noise of disgust, but he was fairly sure that what he was looking for was—

Snap!

Here.

The moment his fingers closed around something cool, he yanked his arm back out with a triumphant jerk.

In his hand was a small, sac-like organ, still glittering faintly green under the kitchen’s golden light.

“There you are,” he whispered.

Maeve leaned closer despite herself. “Is that—”

“The organ doing the toxin conversion? Yep,” he said, delighted. “Fantastic. Absolutely fantastic.” He turned the organ over in his fingers, watching the light catch in its thin, glistening membrane. The thing looked ugly as hell, but it was deeply, city-changing-ly useful—and Maeve didn’t even have any idea why.