Zavier woke to someone screaming his name and the overwhelming coppery tang of blood in the air. He looked down in terror and saw Tess's hands pushing his intestines into his stomach and tasted the familiar sweetness of a healing pill in his throat. He swallowed quickly and saw his health jump up to 32% then start dropping precipitously. Tess's eyes were wide with fear and her screams echoed in the tiny bathroom.
"WHAT DO I DO?" She was shoveling his intestines back inside of him but they were falling out as quickly as she could put them back. He reached down with a shaking hand and tried to hold in what was already there.
"Behind. Toilet." he managed to whisper, the effort alone almost making him pass out again. Tess's improved perception caught it and she lunged to the other side, coming back with the injector. She moved to stab it into him but he lifted one hand slightly to try and stop her.
"Have to. Get everything. Back inside." he gasped. She registered what he was saying and put the injector in her teeth and started pushing loops of intestines back inside of him. With him holding them she was able to slowly pile more and more inside of him.
Too slowly.
"Pill." He whispered and she looked unsure of what to do next. When she reached with one hand coils spilled out of him again and he groaned, barely holding onto consciousness.
She shoved all three pills in his mouth. "Try to swallow one at a time. FOCUS!" She grabbed his chin and pulled her face close to his. "ONE AT A TIME."
He nodded and swallowed one, trying to force the other two into his cheek. Time extended into infinity as he tried to focus on just swallowing one more pill. Then one more. Tess's hands were a blur and she had moved one of her knees into the tub at an unnatural angle to hold a flap of skin shut as she forced the last of his intestines back into him. A panicked look crossed her face when she realized that she wouldn't be able to hold his stomach shut and still reach for the injector that had dropped to the floor.
She dropped her head onto his stomach and held her face against the wound, fingers fumbling around the floor next to the tub just as Zavier's health dropped to 1%.
He passed out.
Just before his vision faded he wished he'd been able to see her face one last time, rather than the back of her head. When he finally succumbed to the peaceful dark he was too far gone to hear the hiss of the injector.
Cass and Luna returned home just as the sun crested the horizon, giving the now cheetah-sized Maisy head rubs and kisses before she jumped to the roof to sleep in the sun. They had reached level 10 and were excited to share their new skills with their parents.
Their excitement died when they saw Tess sitting on the edge of the couch, the dried blood that covered her to the elbows flaking off in the bluish morning light.
"Mom?" Cass said and rushed to her.
She looked up at him with unfocused eyes. "Cass?"
"Mom, what's wrong?" Fear made Luna's voice quaver. She looked around the room then. "Where is dad?" Before Tess could answer Luna was sprinting through the house checking each room. Her gasp of shock when she reached the bathroom was loud enough to make it to the living room. She was back in the room before Tess could say anything.
"What happened to dad? Why is there so much blood all over the bathroom? Where is he?" Fear laced her voice with desperation and accusation.
Tess's response was shaky. "He's next door. I brought him to the Bouchards. He's… not well."
"What happened, mom?" Cass's voice was soft.
Tess and Zavier had a long-standing rule not to lie to their kids. They believed that you couldn't prepare them for the world or teach them healthy relationship techniques by sheltering them from the reality of things not always going well. But she couldn't tell them all of this. She could barely relive it herself.
"Your dad was… experimenting. I don't know with what, exactly, but he hurt himself pretty badly during it. I came back right after we left because I could tell something was going on with him, but I got here too late to stop him." She didn't bring up the message he'd sent her. When they'd left to hunt for the night she'd watched the kids leave with Maisy and turned around to surprise him. She knew him well enough to know that he'd been hiding something from her, and that he had been getting more and more desperate. She'd seen the lie in his body language even as he'd smiled and waved goodbye, and she wanted to have a serious conversation about what was going on.
She'd just crossed into their backyard when she'd received his message. The door almost didn't survive her blowing through it like a cannonball and the strong scent of blood led her to the bathroom. What she had seen triggered her in too many ways. Her husband dying in front of her and the spatters of blood covering the bathroom had been enough, but the sight of him cut open and gutted triggered something darker in her. In her darkest moments, when suicide seemed like the only option, she'd dreamed of cutting into herself and pulling the pain physically out of her. The thought of her blood draining out of her, carrying the pain and poison inside her onto the floor and leaving her empty and clean had been its own special hell of insomnia too many times. She thought she'd been over it with the newfound purpose The System had brought to her life, so seeing him like that had crashed into her like a physical blow to her solar plexus, nearly threatening to overwhelm her with its pure coppery miasma.
In the moment she'd had nothing to think about except fixing Zavier, and her brain focused solely on the task of keeping him alive at any cost. When his health had shot to 100% but then started bobbing up and down like a fishing lure on a lake she'd slung him over one shoulder and sprinted to the Bouchards. They'd let her in immediately and Chloe had settled him onto the table, her hands moving over him with magical care.
"He'll live, but there's something odd happening with his physiology," she'd said. "The healing potion is doing what it can but it seems as if it's having trouble locking in what his healthy body should be like."
Tess knew the truth even as she spoke it. "He's been suffering a lot of damage lately. I think he's been down to near death multiple times a night for the last week."
Chloe nodded absently while looking him over. "That would make sense. As far as I can tell, the healing potions identify a healthy state and attempt to revert the body back to that state. If he's been suffering a lot of injuries while also consuming large doses of the healing pills he most likely overloaded his system without giving it enough time to rest between injuries to establish a healthy state." She stopped and looked up at Tess. "In short, there's enough residual healing potion inside of him to bring him to full health, but his body doesn't know what healthy is."
"Will he recover?" Tess couldn't stop the quaver in her voice.
Chloe hummed to herself thoughtfully before replying hesitantly. "I'd say yes, but I don't know what shape his body will settle into when it decides what 'healthy' is. He could end up perfectly healthy, he could end up immune to healing pills, or he could end up with potion-induced cancer from the massive overdoses that are trying to knit his systems back together."
Tess gasped and covered her mouth with her hand. Chloe realized what she'd said and quickly stepped up to her. "Oh, don't worry, don't worry. I've been working on better versions of healing potions that work on a cellular level versus just trying to reset the body. Leave him here with me and I will get to work on him. We'll bring him back over once he's healed up. You can check on him later if you like." She patted Tess on the shoulder in the comforting but slightly distant manner of a doctor's bedside manner. "Go home and rest, there's nothing you can do here. He's safe."
Tess didn't remember the walk home or making it to the couch. Her mind was replaying every instant of the evening with horrific clarity, the sequences jumbled and out of order. She wasn't even able to form the thoughts needed to tell herself to pull it together. She just kept seeing HIM like THAT. The man she loved more than life itself, the one who had kept her alive when she thought she was past the breaking point. The one that didn't deserve any of the pain and suffering she'd seen. Seeing him like that had… She was pulled out of her reverie by the twins' worried faces.
"We need to go see him NOW," Luna said and started walking towards the door.
"Wait," Tess's voice cracked. "Just wait a second. I need to think. I need to…" she looked down at her arms. "I need to wash my hands. Just wait for me and we'll go together."
She stumbled to the master bathroom, steeling her gaze straight ahead as she passed the guest bathroom he'd been in. Her heightened perception didn't allow her to escape that room unscathed.
The three stood around a hammock strung up between two posts in Madison's workspace. An odd contraption that looked like a bronze ribcage was resting across Zavier's naked chest, but he was breathing easily. Occasionally Madison would open a port and pour liquids of different colors into small glass receptacles running down the sternum of the device while Chloe explained what they were looking at.
"The glass vials hold different alchemical mixtures that are meant to stimulate or inhibit chemical reactions. As it senses an unnatural surge in a specific hormone it releases a counter-agent to reduce the spikes. It is leveling out his system slowly and preventing shock from setting in in any one particular area. We leached the healing potion out of him and are now titrating it slowly during the lulls in his hormonal fluctuations. Think of it as an intelligent IV drip."
"How long will he be like this?" Luna asked. She reached out to touch his face then jerked her hand back with a worried look.
Chloe smiled at her. "You can touch him, just don't jostle the device. Based on the improvement we've seen over the last few hours I'd expect him to be fully recovered this afternoon. He may be a little weak after and will need a few day's rest before getting back to the monster slaying, but he should be just fine."
Tess's worry and fear came out of her in a huge breath and she wrapped her arms around Chloe . Chloe smiled and patted her back. "It's been a tough night for you all. Go home and get some rest, eat something. You have nothing to worry about."
Tess sniffed and wiped at her eyes. "Getting something to eat is getting tougher. We're getting sick of canned vegetables."
"Oh!" Madison's excited voice rung out from the other side of the space. "I have something that can help with that!"
"I do too," Chloe said with an even bigger smile.
An hour later they stood in the kitchen staring at a bloody haunch of Scamperer. Madison had given them a spike that blocked energy from leaving the creature when it was stabbed into them just before death. She'd explained that if she could absorb their energy, why not block it? And if she blocked it, what happened to the animal? As it turns out, blocking the energy from leaving the body just had it settle back into the body before dispersing, leaving a regular old animal that could be harvested. None of them had known how to skin an animal so Tess had just hacked a leg off and worked at cutting the skin away. She had mangled it in the process but it looked to be a perfectly serviceable, if ugly, piece of meat.
"Should we just put it in the oven?" Cass scratched his head. Tess shrugged then slid the pan with the haunch in and turned the oven on.
"I'm guessing it's like a turkey so we probably have a few hours before it'll be ready to eat," Tess said. "While we wait," she went to the table and looked over the four recycled Gatorade bottles sitting on the table and filled with a shimmering liquid. They could hardly believe it when Chloe had explained it to them.
"Our bodies have undergone huge epigenetic changes, especially since reaching level 10. We don't technically survive off of nourishment anymore, we survive off the energy of The System. I've been able to grow energy dense fruits that could be further distilled into hyper-energetic liquids. Each of these bottles contains the equivalent energy of dozens of creatures. Drink these and your body will have the nourishment it needs for a long time, depending on your level and level of activity. You can still eat, if you like, you need to get energy from somewhere. Without this you'd still need to eat something to sustain your energy, but with this liquid you should probably be good for a few weeks."
"Woah," Cass eyed the bottle in amazement. "Do you think we'll level up from drinking it?"
Chloe shook her head. "No, energy created by The System for consumption only seems to work to that effect. But I'm guessing that as we continue to advance and our bodies become more refined we'll need sustenance less and less. I would honestly be surprised if anyone alive six months from now will ever need to eat again."
The afternoon passed and normality returned. They played games of Uno until the roast was determined to be done. Tess was no cook but the gamey, tough muscle was at least edible and it felt good to have a hot meal that didn't come out of a can.
The shadows lengthened and Tess finished cleaning up dinner, getting ready to call the kids to go next door and check on Zavier. Before she could the door opened and her heart almost exploded out of her with joy at hearing his voice.
"Honey, I'm home!" came the weak but cheerful voice. "And I've brought a friend!"
Confusion furrowed her brow as he stepped around the corner, his arm slung across a tall figure's shoulders. The man helping Zavier helped him limp to the table, then gently guided him into a chair. He stood up and Tess's danger sense flared for just a moment before going silent, replaced by an overwhelming feeling of trust and gratitude in this man. She felt guilty doing so but she examined him.
Father Gabriel, Level: 12
Class: Faithful Servant