Chapter Forty-Two - 愛する人守る力両手に持ってるはず

“Now, should we look at what we just got?” Sam suggested, and seeing how the food was practically gone, I had no objection.

“Sure, let’s hop over to the guild,” I said, “and see what’s on the quest board.” I had seen it when approving it, but I couldn’t say I remembered much more than not noticing anything I’d liked to block from going up.

“Um, Jane,” Wynter said. “I’m a bit short on clothes.”

“I need to hop home and grab some fresh panties, too,” Rune added. “How about we meet up at twelve there?”

After some back and forth of who, how, with whom and where, we dispersed. An oppressive yet soothing silence enveloped me as I was alone in the living room until Livia called me into our bedroom to get dressed. I had lived mostly solitary for most of my life, and I always assumed I preferred it that way. On some level, I missed it, but on the surface, all that energy from my fam around me fuelled me. Weird.

🙚⚜🙘

When we arrived at the guilt hall, I had some nagging feeling tugging me towards the—what had we started calling it now? Common room? Not wanting to drag my fam along, who were eager to check out the new addition, I sent them off, promising to follow in “just a sec”.

Despite that feeling, I didn’t really expect to find something going on in the common room, but as I stepped in, I froze in shock. On one of the couches sat two guys I didn’t yet know but who had guild tags above their heads. Both showed clear battle injuries, the larger having a bandage over his eyes, his face being a mess of blood, the wiry one covered in cuts all over his body. In front of them, on one of the tables, lay a woman who was white as a bedsheet and unconscious, blood seeping into the blanket they had placed over her in her lower section even now. Had her player tag not been there, solid and steady, I would have thought her to be a dead body.

“What’s going on here,” I whispered to Kinasteria, who had come up to me. “Why are they not at a hospital?”

Kinasteria gave me a surprised look, then spoke in the same low tone. “Have you seen what a non-system blade in the hands of a norm does to a player’s body?” she asked. “Obviously not. It, at best, gives you an itchy scratch. They won’t be able to do shit for them there. It’s in your help pages, you should read them.”

“Um, my interface’s still not up to that level. Pre-system magical, you remember?” We had talked about this with her around, didn’t we? Control-F, I need a search function for my life…

“Sorry, Jane, this puppet’s NPC programming can’t cope with that.”

“Ten?” I thought I recognised the cadence in her voice.

“Yeah, who else? They won’t let any other Gamma into your general vicinity, afraid you’ll corrupt them too. Anyway, let’s stay on topic here, please? This is the remains of today’s group. They went for the dungeon as their very first quest, all high and mighty. Got their DPS killed and came back here begging for help. Kina gave them potions on credit, but tier-one potions can only do so much. Surface wounds, speeding up natural healing, avoid scarring and such.”

I nodded. I hadn’t known what potions could do, but it made sense that they didn’t replace healers now that I knew healers were coming. “Why didn’t you call me?” I asked.

“I was going to, but then I noticed you were onboarding two healers,” Kinasteria said, herself again, “and putting in the ER. I figured you’d be over with them soon anyway.”

“We could have been here earlier,” I objected.

“So what? They are stable for now. The girl will bleed out in three or four hours; other than that, there’s no hurry.”

“But they are in pain…”

“And they are thinking about how they messed up. Every second they sit there, the story they’ll tell in the future will have more pain behind it and will have more impact. Not everyone needs to learn from their own mistakes; second-hand works for most people. But for that, the retelling needs to have impact.”

“I disagree,” I said. “Letting people suffer needlessly so their story gets better is wrong.”

I grabbed my cell and fired off a quick text to Livia, asking her to ask Charlie and Wynter to hurry up. I didn’t have their numbers. Another oversight. Then I sent Livia a second text, asking her to organise a new cell phone for Wynter. It would have been a miracle if hers hadn’t been lost.

“Talk to them,” Kinasteria prompted me. “They need it.”

🙚⚜🙘

“Hey guys,” I said in a solemn tone as I approached. “I’m Jane, the guild leader. My condolences for your loss.”

The wiry guy, Dylan, looked up. “Thanks,” he mumbled. The other one, Max, didn’t react. Upon seeing me looking at Max, Dylan added, “He’s pretty out of it. The elf gave him something. He blames himself for this shitshow, and he was friends with Daisy. Maybe more.”

“What happened?” I asked, now that I had him talking.

“We messed up is what happened. Simple as that.” Dylan shrugged.

“Please, Dylan,” I said, trying to sound sympathetic. “This may help others, and I promise I won’t make fun of you. It’s not as if I haven’t messed up and got people killed myself.” Mostly myself, but I didn’t need to tell him that. Telling him about resurrection would only raise his hopes for no reason. Daisy was dead longer than the twenty minutes Wynter could bring her back at level one.

“Fine, you’re right. We got the quest, thinking it’d be a walk in the park. We joked around while the elf gave us a rundown on what to expect, missing half of it. When we got into the first level, Max, in the front, stopped, and I walked around him. Right into the blade trap.” He pointed at his holy and blood-crusted sneakers. “It hurt like hell, not at all like playing a video game.” He let out a pained laugh. “Who’d have thought…”

I guess stuff would hurt like normal for someone without the ability to ignore the RDSF. I never thought about this. For me, it took actual structural damage (i.e. a troll) to really feel pain I couldn’t simply ignore. I just nodded solemnly.

“Daisy helped me walk, and we decided to get out of there. Call it cowardice—“

“Or a very smart choice,” I interrupted him.

“Or that. But we didn’t get far. At the first corner, Daisy and I lost our balance and tripped. We were falling towards the traps, but then Daisy shoved me off her towards safety. Max tried to grab her, getting his face nearly sliced off and his eyes destroyed. Daisy landed inside the trap field, over multiple of them, and rolled over even more. She was cut and burned into multiple pieces, but at least she died quickly. Her head was crushed into a paste by a stone block in an instant.”

“Shit,” I said unintentionally.

“Yeah, that’s what a dead body smells like when it gets cut in half,” Dylan said without real humour in his voice. “We patched up Max and tried to hoof it, this time more carefully. Turns out, the exit door wouldn’t open; just gave us a notification to finish the level first. We hoped it was just the goblins and attacked them. Max was mostly useless, other than to soak up some hits, Lauren has no damage spells, only boosts, so it fell on me. I barely managed it, but…” He held up his hands, showing multiple broken fingers.

“Doesn’t that hurt?” I asked.

“It does, but whatever your little angel added to those potions is good stuff.” It must be if it left him as clear in the head yet emotionally detached as he was. “Turns out, you have to clear the whole floor. With no way to beat that brute, Lauren took one for the team.”

“Double shit,” I said. “I’ve seen how he, um, yeah.”

“You can say it. How he rips women apart and fucks their insides into a fine paste. I’ll never forget her cries of pain or the pink foam when her blood mixed with his cum. I grabbed her, and we basically ran here. Not that a guy with holes in his feet carrying a passed-out, bleeding woman and leading a blinded guy can run very fast.”

“And there was no issue getting here in that state?” The streets weren’t exactly crowded on Sunday morning, but they weren’t empty either. People would have panicked seeing them, I expected.

“Other than the system putting me a coupled hundred XP in debt to pay for a ‘don’t let norms see system business’ bubble? Nope, none,” he said with sarcasm.

“See? You just gave me some valuable information there. I didn’t know about that feature,” I said, more to build him up. Of course, the system had some measures in place. I should have assumed that on my own if I really thought about it. Still, knowing was better than assuming.

“Yeah. But now what? Elf girl said something about waiting for a healer?”

“Indeed. In one way, you were really lucky this happened today, as I bought the infirmary upgrade for the guild just today. Likely while you were still in the dungeon. Yesterday, we got our first two healer classes. They’ll be here within the hour.”

“Yay, us.” He let out a sad laugh. “Jane, one question, please.”

“Sure, anything.”

“You’re a woman.” He stared at Lauren’s white and motionless face for a moment. “Would it be kinder…should we really…I don’t know how to say it, you know? That trauma?”

I did understand him. And I was the last one to ask that question. Ok, maybe not the last one; Geri would have been a worse choice, for sure. “Dylan, that kind of trauma can shatter a woman’s mind; you are right. Or she can work through it and come out mostly alright on the other side. I know someone who was beaten as a child; she’s borderline insane. I also know someone who was raped as a child, and she’s one of the sanest and happiest people I know. There’s no way to know how Lauren will turn out, but I know we have to give her the chance to get through this. She will need therapy, but one of our healers has a skill for this, if Lauren wants that. Otherwise, I can get her recommendations for several good non-player shrinks.”

He nodded, not taking his eyes off Lauren. There seemed to be something more in them than just empathy for a group mate. “She was a virgin,” he said in a whisper as if talking to himself. “Catholic, and so proud of keeping herself ‘pure’ for some future husband…

Or did she just tell you that to keep you out of her panties? Maybe I was too cynic here, and she really was that way, but in my experience, the girls who were the loudest about not having sex were doing the wildest stuff in secret. Like that one girl in my school who’d been obnoxiously preaching about saving ourselves for marriage, even importing a bunch of those weird red rings from overseas, until she got pregnant and became the laughingstock of the whole school.

I left Dylan to his contemplation and returned to my fam to cue them in. They had wanted to enter while I was talking to Dylan, likely because I took so long, but Kinasteria had intercepted them and sent them away.

🙚⚜🙘

“That’s some messed-up shite,” Sam said, sitting on our new dinner table. It was simple in construction, just a 4-inch thick slab of wood on four solid legs, but made of a beautiful deep brown wood. The suite as a whole looked way better than I had expected from the blueprints. I had pictured it in the same commercial backstage chic the rest of the guild had, but it was far from that. The floor was dark hardwood, the walls plastered in earthen tones, and the two bedrooms were separated from the rest by floor-to-ceiling curtains of heavy double-layered felt the same colour as the walls.

“What? People dying from fights and traps, or Chloe’s hussy not ripping all three apart with his bare hands?” Livia answered with some sharpness in her voice. “This is not a game, even if the system makes it seem like some great fun adventure. People need to learn that. They can get hurt, and not just in a PEGI-12 way.”

“I know that,” Sam snarled. “People can get hurt that way even without the system. But it’s messed up those aliens throw us into danger while letting us feel they’re doing us a favour.”

“You have a point there, Sam,” I said, surprised she had the clarity to see it. “At its core, this is an alien invasion, we cannot forget this. And while the AIs appear to be friendly, they’re still bound to that. We…” I trailed off when I saw that her eyes were glazed over. I looked at the others, and they were all the same. Where had I gone too far?

“Then let’s try to make the best out of it, Sam,” Geri said a moment later. “They may have forced this tech onto us, but they are also giving us the means to use it and become stronger. They could just as well have wiped us out, so I say we give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they want to help us with that.”

“So what do you propose they intend with adding monsters and dungeons?” I asked, but to no avail. It seemed there was no questioning of what the system allowed us to do or why; only light complaining was available.

Before the others could recover, there was a knock on the door. I opened it to find Charlie and Wynter there, both freshly dressed, Charlie’s hair still wet. “What’s the emergency?” she asked.

I bid them in, and we filled them both in, too.

“Yeah, sorry. I’m useless there,” Charlie said. “I maxed out my links, and it’d take days to sever one.”

“I should be able to help them,” Wynter said. “I have the skills, but I’m not sure how often I can use them. My mana levels are capped while my body is recovering. But let’s get that girl into the infirmary before she bleeds out. Healing a living body is so much easier than getting a dead one back into shape.”

🙚⚜🙘

The infirmary was a weird mix between a modern doctor’s room and some medieval witch’s hut. In the centre was an examination couch that looked mostly modern aside from some steampunk aesthetic in its legs. Around the sides of the room were cupboards with dispensers for gaze and other tools mounted to the wall below, a handwash sink, and a drying rack with a selection of herbs next to a cauldron on an induction hob.

We placed Lauren on the couch, then Wynter chased everyone but Charlie out of the room. Seeing how waiting in the corridor alongside our craftrooms would become uncomfortable quickly, I splurged on the door connecting our suite to it. I selected one with a built-in window and blinds so we could keep an eye on the infirmary door from the dinner table.

“That’s a nice place you got here,” Dylan commented. “Thinking of moving in?”

“In a way, yes,” I said. “But it’s more of a multi-purpose room. We can stay here when we have guests and our bed at home is too small, or when it gets late. We can use this as a conference room or just to hang out. It also serves as the guild brothel.”

“It what?” Dylan asked.

“You haven’t heard?” Geri asked with a grin. “All guild officers are whores, and guild members get a special discount.”

“It just made sense to have a workplace at the guild,” I added, enjoying the shocked and confused look on Dylan’s face. “Our schedules are just too random nowadays.”

“You’re pulling my leg, aren’t you?” he asked. So the system had finally run out of nymphomaniac crazies?

“No, we aren’t,” Sam said.

“We’d be happy to pull your third leg if you got the coin,” Geri said. “Or pounds. We take both.”

I was just waiting for him to ask if we were hiring, but he just shook his head, then said, “I’ve never met a woman who actually worked as a professional, so excuse me if I don’t know what to think of that.” Smart guy.

“So far,” I said in way of explaining, “you are the first group I met that’s not made up of people who are way off societal norms. Although I can’t speak about yesterday’s, I haven’t met them yet. But the first four groups, we’re all not what most people would call normal.”

🙚⚜🙘

About an hour later, Charlie got out of the ER and asked for me. She waved off Dylan’s question with a simple “later”.

“Guild mistress prima,” Wynter greeted me formally when I entered the infirmary. She was standing at the sink, scrubbing her arms, which were bloody to the shoulders. This explained why she only was wearing panties—the infirmary didn’t come with scrubs, I’d say.

“Guild healer Wynter,” I returned her greeting. Lauren lay on the couch under a fresh blanket, looking a tiny bit more alive in the face, but I couldn’t see what they had done to her.

“I already wrote up a formal report,” she pointed at a system monitor that was mounted on a swivelling arm, “but I wanted to run it by you in person first.”

“No need to be formal,” I said, “but I do appreciate the concern. What’s the verdict?”

“She’ll live. And if properly cared for, she’ll make an almost full recovery in a week or two, depending on my state.”

“What’s the ‘almost’ part about?” I asked. Was that why she had seen the need to talk to me alone first?

“That’s the delicate information,” she said with a frown. “It doesn’t say anything about it in the help pages on healing, nor in any healing skill we have access to, but even the miraculous healing the system can do has limits, and I’m afraid you won’t like those any more than Lauren.”

“Mhhh…”

“For Lauren, aside from minor cuts and bruises, all damage was concentrated in the path of that hobgoblin’s member and the immediate surroundings. To begin the healing process, I first had to clear this area of foreign material and dead tissue.” She held up her hands she had stopped scrubbing to talk to me. “Bloody mess. I then sealed off the wound with a magic membrane and stimulated the regrowth progress. The missing tissue will regrow slowly, using my healing energy as I can feed it to her. This, however, is when I ran into a snag.”

“Of which kind?” I asked.

“Of the kind ‘error: cannot regrow this type of tissue’. The system made it very clear to me that it cannot, no matter the method of healing used, regrow ovaries or testicles.” She stopped speaking and looked me in the eyes, holding my gaze.

It took me way longer to understand what she was telling me. This wasn’t about Lauren; I didn’t need to know what long-term issues she had. Wynter could have told Lauren in private about this. This was about me.

But did it really affect me? I wasn’t sure I had lost my ovaries in one of the two death experiences I had. Then I recalled I had the conception control ability and concentrated on it. I felt into myself for those three spots I had felt before when I had stopped my cycle. The big one came up almost instantly, but the two smaller ones to the sides…they were indeed gone.

I felt Charlie’s hand grabbing my arm, then realised I had lost control over my knees and was dropping to the floor. “Healing sleep!” I heard Wynter saying in a resonating voice, then all became black around me.