The week that passed was a proper nightmare.

  Gael considered himself many things: a doctor, a poisoner, an artist of the scalpel. He could stitch a man’s intestines back together while half-drunk on alcohol, yammer circles around the southern ward laws, and diagnose a fever by the smell of a man’s sweat. But manual labor? Ha. That was work for desperate men and sorry bastards who liked straining themselves, and he wasn’t one of those men.

  Even if my attribute levels are higher than the average man, they ain’t so high that intense physical labour don’t make my back hurt.

  I ain’t even got enough time to cut up the last Myrmur carcass for more points.

  And yet here he was: one full week of hauling bricks, hammering nails, plastering walls, and somehow not dying while fixing the damned roof. Maybe he should’ve found some time to increase his physical attributes by eating the damned Myrmur carcass, but between Cara’s constant nagging and his own giddy excitement at seeing the clinic rebuilt as soon as possible, he kinda just forgot about it.

  Now—at the end of the week—their quaint little clinic actually looked downright respectable.

  Who would’ve thought?

  Early in the morning, Gael, Maeve, and Cara stood at the front door, staring into the prayer hall like soldiers surveying the aftermath of a long and bloody battle. Sweat stuck their clothes to their skin, and Gael could feel every overworked muscle screaming betrayal. The new cushions they’d bought for their new benches were neatly arranged in rows like makeshift infirmary cots, the polished wooden floorboards no longer creaked like they were whispering the last words of the dead, and even the multi-colored stained glass windows on the walls and behind the altar—impulsive and unnecessary expenses on Cara’s part, if one were to ask him—made the place look almost civilized.

  Gael planted his hands on his hips and inhaled deeply.

  “Let’s see… prayer hall, fixed,” he mumbled. “Stairs to the surgical chamber, fixed. Surgical chamber itself, refurbished and functional. Bedroom now has three single beds instead of a single double. Bathroom next to the bedroom is usable. Twenty benches all fitted with cushions which can be used as medical beds, check, and… that’s the clinic’s basic necessities all replaced and accounted for.”

  Cara wiped the sweat from her brow and leaned against the doorframe with a sigh. “Not bad for a bunch of brokes pretending to be construction workers.”

  And then—because of course the city couldn’t let them have this one peaceful moment—a voice spoke from behind them.

  “It does look nice, but the Great Saint would weep tears of despair at her current state”

  Gael twitched, instincts screaming danger. Maeve had already turned, hand brushing the button on her briefcase, but the man behind them was neither a thief nor a murderer—though Gael might have preferred one or the other.

  It was Old Banks. And he wasn’t alone. Standing beside him was Miss Alba and her two little children, and for the children’s part, they were absolutely starry-eyed as they admired the bright and pretty clinic.

  … Pretty, but for the statue of Saintess Severin perched on the altar at the back of the prayer hall, whose head was still lopsided and held onto her neck with medical bandages.

  Can’t really do nothing about that.

  Only the dogs of the church have the means to fix their statues.

  “The place almost looks like it used to,” Miss Alba mused, her sharp eyes flicking across the freshly cleaned floor and neatly arranged benches. “Back before you two showed up here, anyways.”

  Maeve frowned slightly as she glanced at Gael. “I thought the two of you were born here.”

  Before Gael could throw out a well-crafted lie, Miss Alba blinked at Maeve like she’d just asked whether the sky was green. “They didn’t move in here until a few years ago. It was all the talk around these blocks back then. A young man and lady voluntarily moving into Blightmarch, the southern ward of plagues? Just where could the two of them have come from?”

  Maeve’s expression shifted, eyes narrowing, but Gael wasn’t about to let this conversation happen. He clapped his hands together and thumbed out the front door.

  “And shouldn’t you be running your noodle shop, Miss Alba?” he said as loudly as humanly possible. “Who let you out this early?”

  Miss Alba gave him a long, unimpressed look. “I let myself out.”

  “Unfortunate.”

  “I’ll remember that next time you come begging for extra meat in your bowl.”

  Her children snickered. Gael shot them a glare. They glared back. A silent war waged between him and two brats who didn’t yet understand the delicate economy of bribery and favors, but Miss Alba sighed and grabbed her kids, steering them towards the door.

  “I was simply paying the local doctor his due respects,” Miss Alba grumbled, patting her children on the head. “Come on. Let’s leave the doctor alone before he passes out from overexertion.”

  Gael grinned. She had no idea just how much alcohol he’d consumed last night just to keep moving, but as he watched Miss Alba and her children disappear out the door, Old Banks remained standing in the entryway like a vulture studying a half-dead corpse.

  He walked deeper into the prayer hall, his greatsword-cane tapping lightly against the floorboards, expression unreadable.

  “This is a good start,” Old Banks admitted, “but it’s still quite the rudimentary place to be calling a clinic.”

  Old Banks continued forward, gesturing lazily around as he spoke.

  “One surgical chamber.” He nodded up towards the room in question. “A storage room at the back of the altar for herbs and poisons. One bedroom next to a bathroom. A prayer hall—of sorts—where people can sit and wait for their friends and family, which also doubles as the general ward of the clinic.” His greatsword tapped against the floor in the center of the prayer hall. “And you would really call this the ‘general ward’, boy?”

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  Then he turned to Gael, calm but disapproving in that infuriatingly rich-old-man kind of way.

  “There are only twenty benches-slash-beds here,” he said, voice mild. “Even the smallest and poorest clinics up in Vharnveil have at least two large general wards—one for light injuries, one for more severe cases—with at least ten private rooms for patients who require isolation. That is at least fifty beds in the entire building. They also have at least three surgical chambers, one proper cafeteria with trained cooks manning multiple church-approved food stations, multiple bathrooms—”

  “We have a bathroom,” Gael muttered.

  “—and maybe even a garden area on the roof where patients can recover and take a walk in fresh air. But most importantly…” Old Banks turned a brass dial on his gas mask, letting out a hiss of steam as he ventilated his breaths. “Even the poorest clinic in the upper city wouldn’t require their patients to wear their masks indoors.”

  Silence.

  Cara’s hands curled into fists. She looked like she was going to snap for a moment—like she wanted to curse at the old man for making comparisons to clinics up there they couldn’t possibly live up to right now—but Gael followed the old man’s gaze and squinted as well.

  Because Old Banks wasn’t wrong.

  Right now, the clinic was a safer place than the streets, but that didn’t mean it was safe. The Vile was weaker indoors, but through some combination of open windows, ventilation grates, and all sorts of tiny, imperceptible cracks in the walls, it was inevitable that the poison mist was still present inside the building. It soaked into wood, clung to fabric, and it seeped into lungs like a whisper of sickness. Regular Bharnish would barely notice it with their gas masks on, but patients—weak, sick, dying patients—definitely would.

  The clinic wasn’t equipped to handle any real patients yet.

  Even Maeve looked like she was about to argue—probably on principle alone—but before she could open her mouth, Gael clapped a hand on her shoulder, grinning at Old Banks.

  “You’re right,” Gael said, shrugging. “Clinic’s still shit. But I’d say we’ve reached ‘marginally less fatal’ status, so while I’d tell the sick to enter at their own risk, most of them are already dying. I appreciate the suggestions—though I could’ve gone without the back-handed insults.”

  Old Banks just chuckled. “You’re welcome.” With that, the old baron turned and strode out of the front door, leaving the three of them standing there. “I hope to see something better next time I visit.”

  And as soon as he was gone, Gael bolted across the prayer hall, up the stairs, past the surgical chamber, and into the bedroom. His hands tore through cabinets and drawers, shoving aside bottles of medicine and ink-stained papers, until—

  Aha!

  A quill. A roll of proper paper. And it wasn’t the cheap, brittle kind he usually used for writing prescriptions no one followed.

  With the grace of a true artist in a fit of inspiration, he rushed back out to the prayer hall, climbed onto the five-meter-tall shoulder of the Saint, and began scribbling like a madman.

  Maeve and Cara, still by the front door, continued staring up at him.

  He worked quickly, drawing long, dark strokes, sketching out a large black cylindrical structure lined with swirling bioarcanic glyphs. He didn’t bother explaining. He wouldn’t know how to explain the glyphs, anyways, given he understood nothing and only memorised their shapes.

  I’ve got that book that’ll give me an introduction to bioarcanic engineering, though. I can read that later.

  With a dramatic flourish, he stood, grabbed the edge of the roll, and flung it off the statue. The paper unfurled like a banner, tumbling down until it stopped just short of the ground.

  Maeve and Cara’s eyes followed the illustration, silent.

  Then Maeve, frowning, looked back up at him.

  “You drew… a cylinder.”

  “It’s not just a cylinder.” He wiped the ink stains off his hands onto his already-filthy coat, kicking his legs back and forth over the Saint’s shoulder as he tapped his cane at the drawing. “This machine is called a ‘Vile Eater’, and it’s just the thing we need to get rid of the Vile problem inside the clinic.”

  Cara tilted her head. “And what does it do, exactly?”

  “It eats the Vile. Fucking idiot.”

  If it weren’t for Maeve crossing her arms, Cara might’ve thrown a wrench up at him. “How does it eat the Vile?”

  He leaned even further forward to tap at the glyphs on the sides of the machine.

  “This is just what I heard, mind you, but a few decades ago, some bioarcanic engineer up in Vharnveil figured out that if you rip apart a certain class of Nightspawn just right, you can render it completely harmless without killing it immediately—without giving it a Host to feed on,” he explained. “Then, if you were to stick the incapacitated Nightspawn inside a specially designed preservation chamber carved with these specific bioarcanic glyphs and filled with a specific inert biochemical liquid, you’ll essentially create an environment where this Nightspawn can survive for years on end without feeding on anything solid. You’ll get a little cylinder friend for a few years.”

  Cara chortled. “How humane.”

  “Who gives a shit about those wretches? Anyways, since this particular class of Nightspawn gets high off toxins and venoms, it’ll start sucking in any gas that’s remotely toxic through the pores and holes in the machine, and since the Vile is toxic—”

  “The Vile Eater,” Maeve finished.

  He grinned down at them, fully enjoying the slow realisation dawning on their faces.

  “At max range, I hear a Vile Eater can clear out fifty square meters’ worth of poisonous mist,” he said. “But I don’t think we’ll have to install one that big. I’d say thirty-five meters? Thirty meters? We’ll get one that’s just powerful enough to clear out the Vile in the clinic.”

  “That does sound useful.” Cara hummed. “But how much is one even going to cost?”

  “The market price should go for something like… ten thousand Marks?”

  “And you do realize we just spent five thousand Marks on materials for repairs. We won’t have enough until next month’s payment from Old Banks.”

  “Ten thousand is market price,” he said, wagging a finger down at Cara. “And as far as I know, Vile Eaters are only sold in one place in this southern ward of ours.”

  Maeve looked puzzled, but Cara blinked for a few seconds before her eyes lit up excitedly.

  “Ah,” she grumbled. “That place.”

  He thumbed back at the bedroom. “Get the grocery bags. Might as well haggle our asses off for the veggies while we’re at it, eh?”

  Cara didn’t need telling twice. She was already trudging up the stairs, skipping into the bedroom with spring in her steps as she started yammering about all the things she wanted to buy from that place this time around. This was going to be their first time visiting with more than a thousand Marks in their pockets, after all. He couldn’t fault her for being excited.

  As he hopped off the Saint and landed in front of the altar—just to test out his enhanced toughness, if nothing else—Maeve stared at him all befuddled.

  “And where, exactly, are we going?”

  Gael grinned wildly.

  “The local black market.” Then he leaned in slightly as he passed her by, flashing her a bright, utterly mad grin. “Get ready for trouble, Exorcist. I’ve never left that place once without almost getting killed.”

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