62 Slowing Down to Breath
The nurse took Galahad to the hallway in the spire that was sectioned off for poisons, venom, and any other weird afflictions. She sat him at a bed with a curtain that wasn't closed, giving him a bottle of a light yellow liquid and a Crystal tablet.
"Drink that to counteract the Vesplug stinger, and I'll be back to give a proper assessment to the wound after I deal with a whole team that entered a cavern full of those damn things. And maybe take you to the public showers later, you smell rather . . . potent."
She paused to word her words carefully before saying something that could potentially upset a patient. Then she could tell by his first impression was that of a joker, she let her thoughts go unfiltered.
"Honestly, I don't understand how any of you adventurers can just go down there and think facing poison wielding beasts is a good idea in the slightest."
Her questioning statement was valid for someone in her career. many people go down into the dungeon just to end up injured or killed for a bit of money. Someone with a class specialized with healing was not always in favor of such violence, especially when they had to deal with the aftermath and mourning that came with it.
"Ehh, what can I say, it pays well. I'll be fine." He pretended to suddenly understand her rush and waved her off to go work, letting her know he wasn't concerned with her leaving and to appear like he wasn't already well aware of the situation.
When first entering, He told the nurse he was stung by a Vesplug and the poison had entered his body, that much was true. What he didn't tell her was the poison was flushed from his body when he consumed so many orbs to heal and removed the toxins while he leveled up a bunch of times in less than a minute.
The nurse also had no idea that he had been in the same cavern as Arkiu's team, who was sitting next door had just left from and where she needed to go.
She thanked him for his patience and told him to fill out the information on the tablet before walking out to her other patients.
Galahad set down the tablet and drained the bottle of rather sour elixir in case the Karmic System had been lying for some reason about his power to heal away poison. The last thing he needed was to have died from trusting words that pop up in his vision.
After emptying the bottle in four gulps, another bell went off.
[ Abnormal Substance Detected ] [ 40:00:00 ]
The timer started counting down in the corner of his view, but he ignored it. Galahad needed to get one more thing done that night and he doubted drinking a curing potion was a big issue. His last reason for coming up to the second floor of the spire was a short window of opportunity that he couldn't miss.
After he was done with that opportunity, he had no apparent reason to stay in the spire's medical center for healing or cleaning out the already scarred over wound.
He peered around the corner of the room and saw the coattails of the nurse entering a room across the hall and a little ways down. It was the room keeping Arkiu and his team in treatment, Galahad's last stop before making his leave.
The whole reason for coming up here was to get his Magic Sword back.
*****
In the room next door, Elldry was laying down in a bed with her chest inhaling and exhaling very deeply. She was still unconscious and had a Stem slowly dispensing an antidote into her digestive track.
Tern was still looking somewhat pale from the heavy sting he got in his arm, but the fast medical response he received was doing his body good. Now that he had heard news about Elldry being in a stable condition and nothing too severe happened to her, he was able to lean back in a chair, resting against her bed with his eyes shut.
The rest of the group was scattered throughout the room in the extra chairs or on the room floor with tension still pulling back on their faces. They didn't just let go of the fact that they let a man die in the dungeon barely twenty minutes ago.
Even if the masked stranger forced their hands into leaving, they still couldn't stop seeing the Vesplugs swarming and the lethal gas looming over him.
Arkiu didn't know what to tell them, he couldn't even think of any reassuring words to tell himself. All he could do was flick his finger against the empty sheath on his forearm to make a repeatingly dull thud. He guessed that during the rescue attempt he had lost his knife while running, not giving it too much thought. His mind was elsewhere, and buying a new knife wasn't the priority of the moment.
"Alright, so I had those two checked." Stated the nurse as she came walking in very quickly and authoritatively. "Now I need the rest of you to take off your armor and let me see for any more traces of Vesplug poison, any cut could be bad.
Everyone began unstrapping their armor pieces and weapons' sheaths before putting them in the hallway to prevent making the packed room even more enclosed with objects.
Arkiu finally realized he was still carrying the heavy Greatsword on his back all this time. The last trace of the Stranger who called himself Solteer.
'I'll figure out what to do with this later.' He thought while looking at the blue gem in the center of the hilt. He set it down with everyone else's gear and went back inside to be checked.
Everyone was now standing inside with nothing but their under armor clothing. It wasn't embarrassing to be standing in the room with just the skin tight fabric, but when the nurse went around lifting up shirts where there cuts or was feeling around rather sensitive areas, the faces around the room grew red and averted eyes.
No one seemed to have collected tiny scratches that exhibited the affects of poison. It was still necessary to check when even small doses could escalate overtime. Shortly after, the Nurse had everyone put their shirts on and filling out information on individual tablets.
She picked up on their rather grim expressions that followed the earlier embarrassment. She didn't know the full story, but pieces together her own idea of what happened. Their friend who was still unconscious nearly died that night and they felt it was their fault.
She wondered if they were going to come out of the night with some form of trauma after seeing their friend nearly die.
'Maybe it's for the best, nearly losing a friend can change the way people perceive their own lives.' She thought while packing up the gear and heading back to her other patient she deemed the jokester.
She walked off and after that, a rather large and unanimous sigh went around the room. They didn't know how else they were going to handle this when Elldry woke up.
Right when Tass was about to bring up who should tell her the details the next morning, the sound of someone dropping a Karmic tablet against the wooden floor was heard.
"What the hell?!" Exclaimed the nurse from the hallway.
Arkiu was still somewhat battle stressed and had jolted up to see the commotion. He entered the hallway to see the nurse was looking into a room across from theirs, she had a hand to her open mouth in a shocked expression.
He ran over to see an empty room with nothing but an empty bed and one of the bedstands with a uncorked bottle and tablet on top.
"That idiot left before I could treat him." She muttered to herself before getting flustered and angry at the whole situation. That was a lot of paperwork she was going to need to fill out before the end of her work shift.
'I swear, this is the last time I ever let them try and push the midnight shift as a one-person job.' She glared off into space while walking back to her station in the front of the hallway.
The nurse was already coming up with several arguments she was going to make with her boss in the guild office. Her agitated stare and huffing became something that an unfortunate few were certainly about to receive the moment the guild office opened that morning.
Before Arkiu could ask about why she was so stiff about the situation, she walked off. He looked back at everyone's gear in the hallway, it was all still moved to the side. It looked like it was untouched, until he saw something was plainly missing.
Solteer's blue Greatsword had left the spot he put it and in replacement was his forearm guard moved to the top of the pile. Arkiu picked it up and looked down both ends of the hallway to see nobody there.
"What is it?" Tass asked as he peeked out from the room with curiousity. It hardly seemed professional for a nurse to start swearing loudly in the hallway and storming off.
Yet Arkiu just kept staring at his arm guard, suddenly giving out a light chuckle and a half smile as he showed the archer what was he thought was so funny.
In the sheath that sat underneath the forearm of the armor, was a knife. His knife.
"Seems we have some interesting news to tell everyone." Arkiu then fully grinned to himself, confusing Tass even further.
*****
Galahad had his black armor melt back into his skin as he walked alone down the staircase to the main floor of the spire. Most of the market stands were either closed or starting to pack up as the influx of people from the Shift were gone.
He walked out of the spire with no one stopping him and only receiving a few looks for the smell he emitted. The black armor had melted back into his skin, but that didn't provide any help on removing the odor.
Galahad took the nurse's recommendation and used one of the many public showers provided in the bathhouse near the market districts. The water pressure was halfway decent and the shampoo had a strong mint scent, so He had nothing to complain about.
Once he was freshly washed and back on the street, he noticed a few people eyeing his still giant magic weapon. He had managed to snag the weapon thanks to the shear luck of Arkiu and his team temporarily throwing their stuff out into the hall. Once he had the sword, he put the knife back in its sheath and booked it out of the medical floor.
He walked off to one of the many side alleys to avoid anymore attention and checked the time. It was a little after one in the morning with a large amount of night left. Galahad had ended up leaving earlier from the dungeon than anticipated, so he had a bit for free time to just catch up on sleep.
Before walking back out from between the two buildings, he tried one more thing. He willed the blade on his back to shrink down to the size of a short sword.
At first, nothing happened. Then the blade shivered for a moment and began slowly heating up to its red hot color and shrank down to what Galahad was picturing. It took twice as long as the normal speed to reshape, but Galahad was glad it shrank down at all.
He enjoyed the brief moment of success and began aimlessly walking towards the areas with taverns and places with overnight stays. He didn't know if he should consider one o'clock late night or early morning, but the longer he walked around Diagon during that time; the more exhaustion he felt weighing down on his body.
Galahad felt as though he had been pushing himself since the first day he arrived to Diagon. It had only been a few weeks, yet when he backtracked on the events of the last month; his been the most crazy and dangerous events that the rest of his life could hardly compare to.
He ended up walking around the block of overpriced places, trying not spend nearly half a grand of credits for only half a night inside. Then Galahad remembered Regin the dwarve had those musty old couches above the workshop.
*****
Before Galahad left Regin's workshop, he was given a key to a door the dwarf had not yet put on the hinges. After his previous assistant blew up his old door, he just gave Galahad the key saying he'll make a door that fits around it. He didn't really understand how someone could think to build a door and start with the key, but he didn't question it.
When he found himself around the neighborhood of older market buildings, he recognized the yellow paint, but not the new black door at the entrance.
He walked up the sidewalk still covered in wood fragments and pulled out the key from his bag. Galahad was just a few feet away when he realized there was no handle or lock to insert his key. The door was just a slab of some kind of metal with engravings of isometric looking lines just laid out in an odd pattern. At this point he was too tired to go anywhere else and just debated sleeping on the porch.
He slumped down onto the wooden floorboards and let out another yawn. He looked back to the door in defeat and did a double take that the engravings clustered to form the shape of a key. It wasn't an insert for a key to twist and unlock, it was the literal outline of a key matching the shape of the one in his hand.
The placement was so low on the door that had Galahad not given up and laid down, he wouldn't have spotted the insert.
'Of course, its in the place where the dwarf would have no issues. Meanwhile I would have to practically sit down.' He thought while getting back up.
Galahad sat up from his slouch and lined the key up to its hole. When he was only a few millimetres away, an invisible force yanked the key out of his hand and pulled it right into the insert. The lines then began rotating and moving as the key slowly turned clockwise. Once the hole rotated the key ninety degrees, he heard a loud click and the door groaned open.
He watched in blank amazement as the key had done its job and the door spat it back out into his lap.
'I can already tell working here is gonna be really something. And that something is either going to be an experience, or a long ass problem.' He thought while standing up completely and stepping inside.
