The Vile Eater lay sprawled in the center of the central ward like a dead beast. Five meters of solid, ancient engineering covered in bioarcanic glyphs. Its black plating was dulled from years of use. There were vents and exhaust grates meant to filter out corruption, but if it was supposed to look like the most impressive piece of bioarcanic engineering Maeve had ever seen, it wasn’t.

  Frankly, she’d seen more impressive machines back up on Vharnveil. She’d seen the propulsion machine the Blood Barons fed daily to keep the city afloat. She’d seen the bioarcanic weapons and artefacts high-rank Exorcists used on their hunts. In contrast, half of Bharncair seemed to run on crumbling remnants of machines people barely understood, and this one wasn’t even doing the one thing it was designed to do.

  Still.

  It’s… bigger than I thought.

  The prayer hall had been cleared to make space. The benches were shoved against the walls and candelabras were pushed aside, leaving nothing but the fading glow of stained-glass sunlight and the weight of dust settling in the air.

  She stood perfectly still by the side, arms folded, watching as Gael walked in slow, careful circles around the machine. He had a wrench in one hand and his cane in the other, rapping both against the black plating at random intervals and tilting his head to listen like the metal was whispering secrets only he could hear.

  He knocked once. Paused. Knocked again. Frowned and curled his lips.

  After thirty minutes of poking and prodding around, he stopped, stood beside her, and glared at the Vile Eater like it owed him money.

  Well, they did owe Juno money.

  “... This thing is royally screwed,” he declared.

  Maeve sighed. “And… why?”

  Gael twirled his wrench in his hand. “Because the hardest things to fix in the world are the things that don’t look broken.” He tapped the plating again with his cane, this time less like a mechanic and more like a man trying to make a point. “When Juno said this thing was broken, I thought that meant something obvious. You know. Missing parts, twisted framework, snapped glyph lines—anything physical. But there ain’t anything wrong with it as far as I can tell.”

  She gave him a sidelong glance. “So what can we do about it?”

  He knelt beside the machine and pulled a crumpled, dog-eared manual from his coat pocket. It was barely two pages long, written in hurried, messy scrawl—probably by someone who only half-understood how this thing worked.

  Flipping through it with a grimace, he rubbed a hand over his mask and scratched his lenses. “I’ve checked the most basic stuff already,” he muttered. “All the main glyph nodes are intact. The pressure stabilizers are normal. I’ve read through Juno’s little ‘user manual’ three times by now—which, with only two pages, is about as useful as getting a do-it-yourself lobotomy—but I’ve got no damn clue why this thing isn’t working. At this point, I can’t put off reading that ‘Introduction to Bioarcanic Engineering’ book anymore.”

  But as he continued mumbling and muttering and kicking the Vile Eater in irritation, Maeve craned her head and narrowed her eyes at the black machine.

  She wasn’t listening to him anymore, because she could hear something moving inside the machine.

  It was hardly mechanical. Not gears or pressure vents or the slow hum of mechanical arrays. If she had to describe it, it was a low, curling growl. The type one would hear from an empty, starving stomach.

  She stepped forward, kneeling beside Gael pressing one palm to the cold metal. The vibration against her hand was faint, but more importantly, it was a bit erratic—the way a wild beast would rattle the cage it’d been chained in.

  “... It’s weak,” she whispered, “and it’s hungry. This isn’t a mechanical issue.”

  Gael turned to stare at her. “Hah?”

  Maeve ran her fingers along the Vile Eater’s plating, tracing the subtle indentations until they found purchase on a grate near the top: an exhaust port, its slats clogged with grime and disuse.

  “You said this thing works by trapping an incapacitated Nightspawn inside, right?” she murmured, pressing both palms flat against the vent.

  Gael gave a slow nod, watching her carefully.

  “So the Nightspawn inside isn’t dead,” she continued. “But it’s sick. It’s weak. Maybe it’s because of neglect or misuse by its previous owners, but right now, it’s too far gone to feed on any toxin in the air, let alone the Vile.” Her fingers flexed against the metal. “So I’ll feed it and help it recover.”

  “Feed it what?”

  She didn’t answer. Instead, she exhaled, closed her eyes, and called on her Essence Art.

  Purging Blood.

  And under the skin of her palms, her blood bubbled. It rippled in her veins, stretched against her blood vessels, and started squeezing out the pores in her skin. She didn’t even need to cut her skin with a blade.

  For a moment, there was nothing as she watched her blood drip off her skin, seep through the grate, and snake into the machine’s lungs in tiny little streams.

  Then there was laughter.

  Not hers. Not Gael’s. A ragged, slithering cackle rose from the depths of the Vile Eater, bubbling out through the vents in shuddering, breathless gulps.

  The beast within loved her poisonous blood.

  She clenched her jaw, forcing her hands to stay steady. She kept her blood just poisonous enough to bait the hunger, not drown it—but the longer she held her palms there, the harder it got. Sweat pricked her brow. She could feel her blood leaking from every part of her in slow, involuntary streams, no matter how much she tried to keep it contained to her palms.

  For a solid minute, the Vile Eater shook. Rattling groans rolled through the metallic frame until she felt like she was going to physically explode from having to concentrate so hard on controlling how toxic she wanted her blood to be.

  This was enough.

  She pulled back without a word to the Nightspawn, panting, wiping her forehead with the back of her hand.

  “I can’t help it recover overnight,” she murmured. “But if I feed it a little bit of my poisonous blood every day, I think it’ll get stronger. Eventually—maybe after a few weeks—it’ll start consuming the Vile on its own.”

  Silence.

  She turned to see why Gael wasn’t saying anything—and her pulse stuttered.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  Gael wasn’t looking at her.

  He was staring at the floor around them, which was steaming from shallow puddles of glowing green liquid. The unnatural color hadn’t spread very far—only a few meters away from the two of them at most—but it was still expanding, slowly creeping outwards and eating into the wooden floorboards with acidic hisses all the while.

  Maeve gulped hard.

  “... Huh,” Gael mumbled. “This is interesting.”

  And of course, by the time he finished his sentence, he was already crouching and squinting as he dipped his gloved finger into the closest puddle.

  Then he licked the liquid without hesitation, and even smacked his lips for good measure.

  “Yep. Poisonous blood.” He nodded to himself, eyeing the eerie glow of the other puddles around him. “Looks like the same stuff in our bedroom this morning.”

  Maeve clammed up.

  The truth was, she wanted to explain. Wanted to find the words. But as soon as she tried—

  The walls closed in.

  Dark. Cold. The rough scent of damp stone and decay surrounded her on all sides. The catacomb-like tunnel continued stretching ahead, barely wide enough to move through, and the ceiling was low. The walls were slick with fetid water.

  Shadows flickered along the curves of the tunnel in front of her, twisting with movement.

  Myrmurs.

  There were too many of them. Too many segmented bodies scraping. Their needle-like mandibles were clicking, snapping—

  “Do something, Maeve!”

  Her teammate’s scream cut through her head. A few of them were bleeding behind her. A few had already collapsed, a few had already been torn from limb to limb, and yet more Myrmurs were still coming. Dozens of them flooded into the catacombs, climbing over bones and bodies, more ravenous than the higher-ups had said they’d be. She’d come down here with six other Hunters to clear out the catacombs, but they hadn’t expected to be ambushed this early on in the mission.

  This wasn’t supposed to be difficult. If they completed this initiation mission, they’d all be assigned a Host to be their handler, and then they’d become full-fledged Exorcists.

  She’d be a Symbiote Exorcist.

  She’d make her mother proud.

  So, despite the enclosed space, she inhaled sharply and fed her poisonous blood into Mistrender. Every ounce of it. And she couldn’t control it. When she pointed Mistrender at the closest Myrmur and fired, it was a violent surge of blood that roared out the tip like floodwater breaking through a dam, and it wasn’t just her umbrella her blood shot out of. It squeezed out the pores on her skin, burst out from under her nails, and gushed out from the soles of her feet. Her blood poured through the cramped tunnel, drowning the Myrmurs in poison, choking their snarls into gurgling death rattles—but the screaming didn’t stop. Not her’s. Not the Myrmurs’.

  Not her teammates’.

  When her blood eventually drained through the grates, she gagged and threw up into the gutters. She’d gone too far. She’d used up too much of her blood in one go. She’d drowned, suffocated, and poisoned every last living being in the tunnel, and now she was alone.

  But not completely.

  A sputter to her left caught her attention. A trainee the same age as her. He’d survived, but just barely. He was coughing, hacking, blood spilling down his chin, drenched in her poisonous blood from head to toe, and clutching his throat as he slumped against the damp tunnel wall.

  She could still save him.

  She could save one person.

  Without minding his other injuries, she staggered to him, slung him over her back, and turned around to try to leave. She slipped on her own blood. She cried out in pain. She got back up on her feet.

  Their mission was already over. She’d already killed all of the Myrmurs they were sent down here to kill. She could go back up now and have the doctors treat her teammate. If she could just make it back up in time, she was sure their instructors would be able to do something about him.

  She could still save him.

  She could still save him.

  She could still—

  She snapped back to reality and clammed up again at the same time Gael winced, rubbing his temples and wiping his lenses like he’d just seen something he should’ve have.

  … Did he see?

  She sucked in a breath. Cold. Stale. Real. The dark catacombs were gone. No suffocating air. No Myrmurs. No bodies—except there were blood puddles around her, still, gleaming under sickly sunlight.

  And Gael was still kneeling and staring at the drop of blood on his fingertips, completely silent with his back turned to her.

  What would he think if she explained what the puddles were?

  What would he think if she told him these puddles were going to show up in the clinic every single day, every single morning, and even if he was immune to their poison, Cara and his patients probably wouldn’t be if they so much as touched a single droplet with their bare skin?

  Would he kick her out?

  …

  Maeve gritted her teeth.

  She could just not say anything. Or she could lie. Or she could deflect. But of all the people she wouldn’t want to think badly of her, did she really care about what a Plagueplain Doctor would think of her?

  Funnily enough, maybe it was because he was a Plagueplain Doctor that her mouth suddenly opened on its own, her voice coming out weak and unsteady.

  “... My Essence Art,” she started. “It lets me concentrate bioarcanic essence into my blood, which turns it poisonous and allows me to feed it into my umbrella to fire as long range projectiles.”

  Gael said nothing.

  She clenched her hands.

  Just say it.

  It’s not about your safety.

  It’s about everyone else’s.

  “But… I was also born with an ailment,” she continued, pulling up the hem of her dress a little to show the skin on her thighs. Gael wasn’t looking, still, but if he did, he’d see the small, bruise-colored rosettes scattered all across her skin. Her skin that she’d been hiding for the most part with her dress. “It’s called ‘Crimson Weep’. The doctors say it’s caused by a malfunction in my body’s microvascular system, specifically the vessels that regulate blood flow to the skin. Essentially, it means I bleed from my skin when I’m asleep or when I’m not aware of how much I’m physically straining myself. It’s not really a life-threatening ailment—it means I just bleed sometimes—but paired with my Art, it means any blood I let out unconsciously will also be green and poisonous.”

  Still no response.

  She looked away, jaw tightening. “These blood puddles didn’t show the first night I stayed over because all the blood I shot at the Myrmur vaporized from the heat, but now that we’ve fixed the clinic? And this morning, in the bedroom without any cracks in the floor?” Her throat bobbed. “My blood leaks especially hard when I’m asleep. I can’t… really… control it.”

  He still didn’t say anything to that. He wasn’t even looking at her. He couldn’t stop staring at the poisonous puddle she’d just made all over his newly fixed clinic.

  And—damn it, damn it, damn it—the guilt from wrecking the new floorboards hit her first.

  It was a sharp, ugly twist in her gut.

  The words started slipping out before she could stop them—“I’m sorry”—but then she caught herself, shook her head, and shut down before she could make herself smaller.

  She straightened her shoulders.

  “... You know, this is why I said we shouldn’t live together,” she said, gritting her teeth. “Every night, if the windows are closed, if we’re sleeping together in the same tight space, we’ll wake up to—” She gestured around again. “This. Do you want to wake up and accidentally burn your foot off from stepping in a poisonous puddle? Do you want to wake up in the middle of the night for a glass of water and trip and melt your face off?”

  She pulled in a breath.

  “So.”

  A small pause.

  “I’ll move out.”

  And that got his attention. His head snapped up, looking out the front door.

  “I’ll rent out or crash in the building across the street,” she said, gesturing vaguely outside. “I’ll sleep on the second floor. It’ll be annoying with the chain if we’re sleeping apart, but whatever—we can just let it stretch across the street. I doubt anything’s strong enough in this part of the city to break it, but if you say you care about running a safe, proper clinic, you’ll make sure these poisonous puddles never—”

  Gael cut her off. “We can use them.”

  Maeve blinked.

  Once. Twice.

  Her thoughts tripped over themselves, struggling to catch up.

  She’d been bracing for pushback. For anything—disbelief, frustration, maybe even relief that she was offering to leave before he could tell her to—but not this.

  “... What?” she breathed, still blinking, still stunned.

  Gael turned back to her, flashing an easy, carefree grin.

  “We can use your blood for something.”

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