Back to Base

Emile stepped away from the boy and began walking to the door he'd come from. He exited the room and stopped just next to the guard stationed outside.

"Hey! Your healer just killed someone!" Emile told the guard.

But before the guard could respond, the door opened and the boy walked out.

"He was on Death's Row Harold, this guy's new to the front line."

"Why do you keep saying that?" Emile glared at the boy.

"Harold, can you inform our guest here what Death's Row is?" The boy's persona returned to purity and innocence.

"Death's Row is the unofficial term soldiers have given their brethren who are unable to be saved, their brethren who are in row for death." Harold responded monotonically, his gaze aimed directly in front of him.

"And that gives you the right to kill them yourself?" Emile asked.

"We needed an empty bed. Our capacity was full. I was granting him mercy, putting him out of his misery." The boy said without a care in the world.

"You're a sick, demented, disgrace of a human being!" Emile spat and shoved his way past the boy back into the room.

He pulled the curtains in front of the bloodied man's bed. Emile didn't want to be reminded of the death he could have prevented. The boy came back into the room as well, but instead of bothering Emile, he stayed at his desk and watched Emile. His eyes followed Emile's every movement, at one point Emile could have sworn he licked his lips.

But Emile persevered, he kept going from bed to bed, swinging the curtains around to hide himself from the boy's gaze.

Some of the soldiers had minor injuries like cuts and broken bones, those soldiers were healed with the least amount of essence. Meanwhile, some other soldiers had it far worse; missing limbs, ruptured organs, or severe head trauma. These were the soldiers Emile couldn't help, his soul essence simply wasn't enough.

His gift increases cell activity, essentially translating to causing the body to naturally heal itself faster. Emile could not regrow limbs nor could he reconstruct organs. If the body could fix itself in time, Emile could make it happen immediately.

The only exception to this rule is cases where the body could heal itself if it were faster such as fighting an infection. Emile's gift would speed up the cells responsible for eliminating the virus or invading bacteria.

The day quickly came to a close. Emile stayed there late into the night trying his best to heal every person he could, but his soul essence naturally refilled at an unbelievably slow pace. It took about an hour to go from no essence to fully saturated, so half of his day was spent painfully waiting.

However, Emile did in fact learn a lot of things. First, healing minor injuries like small cuts and bruises was incredibly cheap, often only consuming a single point of his essence.

But injuries that exist beneath the skin like muscles, tissues, or bones, those things cost about a third of his essence. Patients Emile assumed had infections or illnesses also took up to a third of his essence, it varied on the severity of their condition.

And lastly, there were the patients Emile could not save. People whose organs had been ruptured, whose bodies were already infected with too many foreign substances, and whose brains lacked oxygen for too long.

Emile returned to the packed Wall Street and boarded his carriage. They left the wall and returned to the desolate and abandoned zones of the kingdom, where the buildings crumbled into stones and weeds grew from the cracked roads.

Emile opened the blinds in the carriage and watched the night. Hours passed in quiet contemplation. Emile couldn't stop thinking about the boy from the infirmary. His sadistic smile and malicious eyes. The gleam in his eyes after he popped the man's brain.

Was he an outlier in this world? Or was he, perhaps, the general consensus? In a war filled world does war become a game?

Emile had already come to terms with having to kill beasts and creatures. After all, they were corrupted, inherently evil beings. With that belief, it's surprisingly easy to accept having to kill them.

But killing a person? Few things are extreme enough to easily justify that. But that boy did. He didn't just accept it, he was entertained by it.

Emile continued gazing out of the carriage window at the still lake that acted as his sky until he eventually fell asleep. Hours ticked by in seemingly silence. All one could hear was the breathing of the horned beast and the rattling of the carriage.

That didn't last long, however, as an ear-piercing shriek tore through the once repetitive black noise. Emile burst his eyes open and stood up in the carriage. Before he could act, another shriek sounded around him. But this one was different, this shriek broke at the end like it was interrupted.

Emile pushed on the carriage door, but something was blocking the other side. He backed away from the window and then slammed his closed fist into the glass, but it didn't break. In fact, it didn't even crack.

"Wait! I'm just the driver! Don't–" the driver was cut off mid sentence.

Emile ripped open the blinds facing the driver's seat and found a headless body slumped over the side rail, blood streaked across the window. Behind the driver's corpse laid the decapitated horned beast, a huge red crystal sticking out of its neck.

Emile started spinning in circles inside of the carriage, rapidly looking out of each window, trying his best to look for whatever was attacking them; but all Emile could see was the rubble of destroyed homes, not a person in sight.

Suddenly, the corners of the carriage began to cave in and tighten around Emile. Looking out of the window he saw a world of red. It was the same rubble as before, but a filter of red was applied to it, like looking out of red sunglasses.

"I wonder if you'll be able to heal your dead driver?" A childish voice echoed between the few still standing alleys, "That would really make you the perfect thing to give her!"