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Eldritch Horror? No, I'm A Doctor
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Nox walked through the empty streets alone.
The city was quiet at this hour. A few cars passed in the distance, their headlights sweeping across intersections before disappearing around corners. Somewhere, a dog barked twice and went silent. The streetlights hummed overhead, casting pools of amber light on the pavement at regular intervals.
His footsteps were the only consistent sound. Steady. Unhurried.
Can I trust them?
The question turned over in his mind with each step. The officers had been cooperative tonight. Eager, even. They wanted the cultists eliminated. They needed what he could provide. The incentives lined up perfectly on paper.
But incentives shifted. People recalculated when the stakes changed.
Ralph is pragmatic. He follows through on things that serve the Empire. As long as eliminating the cultists stays the priority, he'll hold up his end. Axel thinks in numbers. The math is in my favor right now, so he's on board. Steven respects me, or at least respects what I can do. He won't betray that.
Ren turned a corner onto a wider boulevard. The industrial district was ahead. His clinic waited there in its usual silence, the black exterior drinking in whatever light reached it.
But what happens after? After the cultists are gone. After they see what I actually do with that inmate. After the operation succeeds and they finally understand the full picture of what I am.
Will they still be cooperative then?
He walked past a row of shuttered shops. A bakery. A mechanic's place with an old car out front that clearly hadn't been moved in weeks. A restaurant with plywood nailed over the windows.
The military has been watching me since the Varyn incident. Passive surveillance only. They classified me as a Phenomenon. That means they've already decided I'm too dangerous to fight directly. Good. That keeps them cautious.
But caution isn't loyalty. And fear isn't the same thing as trust.
He stopped beneath a flickering streetlight. One of the bulbs was dying, its light stuttering in an irregular rhythm like a clock running out of power.
Tomorrow morning. Army Corrections Command building. High-security facility full of guards who don't like visitors. And Ralph wants me to walk in there myself, in person, to receive an S-rank death row inmate.
No.
The thought arrived with surprising clarity. Not as an emotion. More like looking at a math problem and realizing one of the numbers was wrong.
Walking into a military prison is stupid. I stick out. I look like this. He gestured vaguely at his own coat, his mask, his general existence.
Even if I wore something normal, I would still be the Phenomenon. The thing they classified. The thing they are watching. If I walk into that building, every guard in there knows exactly what I am, and every single one of them is going to be on edge the entire time I am inside.
And if something goes wrong in there, if they decide to use the transfer as a chance to contain me, I am inside their own building. Their territory. Their rules.
I need someone else to go. Someone who looks normal. Someone nobody would look twice at.
I need an avatar.
Ren resumed walking, his thoughts falling into place one after another like dominoes.
The Secondary Mask is still in my body. Undeployed. I have never used it. If I perform Face Assimilation on someone tonight, the Secondary Mask embeds in their face, takes over the body completely.
That body becomes mine to control. A normal-looking person. Someone who can walk into that Corrections Command building tomorrow morning, stand next to Ralph, sign whatever paperwork needs signing, and receive Volker without anyone suspecting a thing.
I send the avatar. Ralph gets his inmate delivered on schedule. And I stay here, in my own territory, where I belong.
The only problem is finding someone suitable. Tonight. Before eight AM.
He needed a body that would work. Someone who looked unremarkable enough to pass through a military facility without drawing attention. Someone healthy, someone whose disappearance wouldn't trigger an immediate investigation. Someone nobody was going to miss for at least a day or two.
Someone expendable.
The thought didn't bother him. It hadn't bothered him for a long time.
So you're not going yourself because you're scared of the guards.
The System dropped in with its usual timing.
A military prison. With guards. Who have guns. And you, the great Dr. Nox, are frightened.
I'm not frightened. I'm being strategic.
You're being a coward. There's a difference, and you know it.
It's strategy. Walking into enemy territory when I can send someone else instead is basic operational logic.
*Enemy territory. They literally just handed you a death row inmate. They let you in a children's bedroom. Steven's wife thanked you. And you're calling it enemy territory.
They are the military. They have guns. They have facilities designed to contain dangerous people. And tomorrow they are going to hand me the most dangerous prisoner they have. If at any point they decide the situation has changed, I want to be somewhere other than inside their building when that happens.
So you're scared.
I have a fragile heart. I need to be safe.
Your fragile heart survived being burned alive for twelve hours.
That was a ritual. This is politics. Politics is scarier.
...
The System went quiet. Not the kind of quiet that meant it was thinking something over. The kind that meant it had accepted something it didn't want to admit.
Fine. Find a body tonight. Deploy the Secondary Mask. Send it to pick up Volker tomorrow. But you're the one who has to explain to Ralph why a stranger showed up instead of you.
I could just say that it was my real face. I always wore a mask after all. Only that idiot trio saw my real face.
Classic.
Ren walked the rest of the way home already scanning his surroundings.He had a few hours. That was enough.
.
.
.
The Golden Lily was one of those clubs that existed in every big city but belonged to none of them. Second floor of a building in the entertainment district, accessible through a private elevator that required a membership card. The lighting inside was warm and golden, the kind carefully chosen to make everyone present look better than they deserved. Jazz music drifted from speakers hidden somewhere in the ceiling, soft enough to fill silence but quiet enough that conversation stayed private.
The tables were spaced far apart. The booths had high backs. The bartender had a policy of not remembering faces, and the clientele paid well for that particular courtesy.
Marcus Webb understood all of this without needing to think about it. He had spent the last four years learning the architecture of places like this. The way the lighting worked. The way the music absorbed conversation. The way expensive alcohol loosened people up while the exclusivity of the venue made them feel safe enough to let it happen.
He was thirty one. He has the kind of face that makes people lose their train of thought mid sentence. Sharp jaw, dark hair that fell across his forehead in a way that looked effortless but took fifteen minutes of careful arrangement each morning, and brown eyes that caught the golden light and turned almost amber. He wore a black shirt, no tie, sleeves rolled to the elbow. Not trying too hard. That was the point.
Marcus was a host at the Golden Lily. One of four men hired specifically because of how they looked. His job, on paper, was to guide wealthy female customers to their tables, pour their drinks, keep them entertained, and make them feel like the most important person in the room. On paper, that was all it was.
Off the books, it was something else entirely.
The club's management knew. Of course they knew. They turned a blind eye because the hosts brought in money, and the money was very, very good. The customers who came back again and again, the ones who spent thousands of dollars in a single night on champagne and private rooms, were always the ones who had gotten attached to one of the hosts. It was the business model, wrapped in velvet and good lighting.
Marcus was the best at it.
Tonight's customer was a woman named Sachiko Tanaka. Forty eight. Recently widowed. Heir to a small but comfortable fortune her late husband had built over twenty years in shipping and logistics. Not the wealthiest woman Marcus had ever worked, but wealthy enough. Lonely enough. Vulnerable enough.
He had been working on her for three weeks.
Week one was observation. Learning her routine, which nights she came to the club, what she ordered, how many glasses it took before she started talking to strangers. Week two was the first contact. He had been assigned to her table by pure coincidence, or so she believed. He poured her champagne, made her laugh twice, and left before the evening got too comfortable. Week three was the pull. He found reasons to come by her table again. Small talk that turned into longer talk. A compliment that landed just right.
Sachiko was not a stupid woman. She ran the logistics side of her late husband's business after he died, and she did it well enough that the company hadn't collapsed. But she was lonely in the specific way that successful women in their forties who have lost their husbands tend to be lonely. The kind of lonely that no amount of business success could fix, and that a handsome man with warm eyes and a genuine-sounding laugh could exploit like a crack in a wall.
"You know," Sachiko said one evening, swirling her third glass of champagne, "you remind me of someone."
"Oh?" Marcus smiled. The smile was practiced to the point where it had become indistinguishable from the real thing. "Who's that?"
"My husband. In his younger years." She laughed softly. "He had that same way of looking at people. Like he was actually listening."
"I am actually listening," Marcus said.
And the strange thing was, in that particular moment, he almost meant it. Sachiko was interesting to him in a way that went slightly beyond the professional calculation. She had sharp opinions about things. She laughed at things that were genuinely funny instead of just politely. In another life, Marcus might have actually enjoyed her company.
But this was the life he had.
The relationship developed over the following month with the same careful precision Marcus applied to everything. Dinner outside the club. A weekend trip to the countryside that she suggested and he agreed to without hesitation. The first kiss happened on a Friday night in her apartment, and neither of them made a big deal about it afterward.
Two months in, Sachiko suggested they move in together.
"I know it's fast," she said, sitting cross-legged on her couch with a glass of wine. "But honestly, Marcus, I haven't felt like this since before my husband got sick."
"Sometimes that's how it works," Marcus said, taking her hand. "When it's right, you just know."
He gave her no reason to doubt him. He was attentive. He remembered small things she had mentioned in passing. He cooked dinner when she came home late from work. He never asked for money directly, not once. That was the important part. He never asked.
Instead, money simply moved in the direction it needed to move.