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Eldritch Horror? No, I'm A Doctor
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Axel was the first to regain his footing.
He did it slowly, one knee at a time, with the mechanical determination of a man whose body was running on the last fumes of something that had not been refueled in a very long time. When he finally got upright, he stood still for a moment, just breathing, looking at the two hundred and thirteen unconscious soldiers scattered across the rubble in every direction.
Then he looked at Nox.
"They need treatment," he said. His voice was flat and stripped down, no volume left in it. "Divine pressure at that concentration. Internal hemorrhaging. Ruptured vessels. Some of them might not wake up on their own."
"I know," Nox said.
"Can you fix it."
It wasn't really a question. Axel had seen enough by now to know the answer. He was just saying it out loud to confirm that someone else understood the situation too, that the weight of it was shared.
"Yes," Nox said. He was already pulling out the Outer God Surgical Set.
Axel watched him open the case of syringes. Watched the green liquid sit completely still inside the glass, not moving even when tilted, already decided where it wanted to go. Awakening Anesthesia. He had seen Nox use it before on patients. He knew what it did. Conscious, paralyzed, feel everything.
"How many," Axel said.
"Two hundred and thirteen."
Axel was quiet for a moment. Then: "That's going to take a while."
"About forty minutes," Nox said. He held the case open and his ten red tentacles rose from his back, each one reaching in for a syringe. "You should sit down. You're bleeding from three places and your left knee is doing something it shouldn't be doing."
"I'm fine."
"You're not fine."
Axel opened his mouth. Closed it. Looked at his left knee, which was in fact doing something it shouldn't be doing.
"After you start on them," he said. "You can do me after."
Nox glanced at him sideways.
"I should be included," Axel said. "Divine pressure hits everyone in range. I took it too."
This was true. Nox could see it. The small hemorrhages behind both eyes, the compressed vessels along Axel's temple, the specific way he was holding his head that meant the pressure inside his skull was not sitting right.
"Fine," Nox said. "Sit there and don't fall over while I start on the others."
Axel sat down against a chunk of broken wall.
The tentacles started throwing.
Each syringe crossed the rubble field in a flat clean arc and struck exactly where it was aimed. Neck. Shoulder. The knee of one soldier who had rolled sideways into an awkward position. Two hundred and thirteen syringes, multiple trips back to the case, a little over two minutes from start to finish. Nox shook the empty case once, tucked it away, cracked his knuckles, and got to work.
The green liquid worked instantly.
Every soldier across the block snapped awake at the same moment, eyes open, bodies locked in place, minds completely present and aware.
Then the screaming started.
Not one or two soldiers. All of them. Two hundred and thirteen voices going off at the same time, each one finding a different register of the same essential emotion, which was the emotion of a person who has just woken up paralyzed in a rubble field and is currently watching a figure with twenty tentacles and a plague doctor mask approach them with surgical instruments.
"WHAT IS THAT."
"WHY CAN'T I MOVE."
"ARE THOSE TENTACLES."
"WHAT IS IN HIS HANDS."
"THAT IS A CHAINSAW."
"WHY DOES HE HAVE A CHAINSAW."
Axel, sitting against his chunk of broken wall with his forearms on his knees, watched all of this begin.
He watched Nox walk into the middle of it completely unbothered, already making the first incision on the nearest soldier, the scalpel moving with the efficient calm of a man running a routine procedure.
"Don't worry," Nox said to the screaming soldier beneath him. "This is standard."
"STANDARD FOR WHAT."
"Medicine."
"THAT IS NOT WHAT MEDICINE LOOKS LIKE."
Axel's color had been leaving him for the past thirty seconds. By the time the second soldier started asking if Nox was a cultist who had infiltrated military ranks, Axel's face had reached the specific pale of a man who has survived forty-seven gate raids and is looking at something that hits differently than all of them.
He watched Nox work.
He watched the tentacles handle closing procedures on three soldiers simultaneously while Nox's hands started a fourth assessment. He watched the geometric scalpel move with a precision that a normal scalpel could not achieve. He listened to the layered screaming from every direction, the sound of two hundred and thirteen paralyzed people who could feel everything and had nowhere to put it, and he thought, with the clarity that sometimes only arrives in the middle of something genuinely terrible: these are my soldiers.
He had brought these soldiers here. He had given the orders that put them in this field. And now every single one of them was awake and paralyzed and screaming while an eldritch plague doctor worked his way through them one by one and the morning was just beginning.
He was still watching when Nox finished the last soldier before him and stood up and turned around.
"Your turn," Nox said.
Axel looked at the syringe in Nox's hand. He looked at the rubble field behind Nox, two hundred and thirteen soldiers all still locked in place, all still contributing to the ambient noise.
"Actually," Axel said. "I'm fine."
Nox looked at him.
"It's fine," Axel said. "You cured all of them, so the situation is under control. The medic team will be here soon. I can just wait for the medic team."
"You have hemorrhaging behind both eyes and a compressed vessel in your right temple," Nox said. "You're not fine."
"I feel fine."
"You're not fine."
"The medic team—"
"Will not be equipped to treat divine pressure trauma at this severity." Nox took one step toward him. "You know that."
Axel did know that. He also knew everything he had just watched happen to two hundred and thirteen people for the past forty minutes, and he knew what it felt like to watch it from the outside and he was, for the first time since he could remember, not certain he wanted to find out what it felt like from the inside.
"I'm a Mythical-rank Berserker," he said, which was true, and also entirely beside the point.
"The anesthesia doesn't care," Nox said.
"I've had bones broken in three places and kept fighting."
"The anesthesia doesn't care about that either." Nox took another step. "Hold still. It will take six minutes."
"Six minutes is a long time."
The needle found his neck.
The green liquid moved.
The door slammed shut.
"AGHJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH—"
The sound came from somewhere below Axel's ribs, bypassed every trained response he had ever developed, and came out of his mouth before his brain finished processing what was happening. It joined the ambient screaming from the rest of the field and contributed meaningfully to it.
Nox, already working, did not look up.
He was, internally, having a good morning.
The numbers ticking up in the corner of his vision were not something he would mention out loud. The steady accumulation of Fear Points from two hundred and fourteen terrified and paralyzed people, running continuously for the better part of forty minutes, was not a figure he intended to share with anyone.
He just worked. Carefully. Precisely. Moving through each procedure with the unhurried competence of someone who did this every day, which he did.
Fear Point farm
Best day of the week.
.
.
.
Brigadier General Hilde Faust arrived at 0614 with sixty-two personnel, four transport vehicles, and the particular expression of someone who had been doing this job long enough to have seen most things and was prepared for whatever waited at the coordinates she had been given.
She was not prepared for this.
The first thing she saw from the vehicle was the skyline. Or rather, the absence of it. An entire city block had been compressed into something that looked less like the aftermath of a battle and more like a geological event. Buildings that had been standing three hours ago were rubble. The street itself had subsided. Cracks ran up every standing surface within visual range and several glass windows had folded inward with a precision that made no physical sense.
"Stop here," she said.
The vehicles stopped.
She got out and stood at the edge of the block and looked at it for several seconds without speaking.
"Brigadier General," said Lieutenant Voss, her second, appearing at her shoulder. "Preliminary sweep shows no active hostiles. Cultist casualties throughout the area. And—" He paused.
"And?" she said.
"Two hundred and thirteen military personnel, unconscious. Scattered across the blast zone."
She walked in.
The soldiers were everywhere. Some had fallen mid-step, some in clusters, some alone near pieces of rubble. Every single one of them was breathing. Every single one of them had foam dried at the corners of their mouths. A significant number had, at some point during whatever happened here, lost control of their bladders.
She crouched next to the nearest one, a B-rank corporal, and checked him over with the quick efficiency of someone who had been a field medic before she was anything else.
Then she stopped.
She checked him again. More carefully this time.
She stood up and went to the next soldier. Checked him. Went to the third. The fourth.
She straightened and looked at Voss.
"Tell me what you see," she said.
Voss looked at the soldier in front of him, a sergeant with a healing cut on his forearm and crusted blood under his nose. He looked. He looked more carefully.
His face changed.
"There's no injury," he said.
"None," she confirmed.
"The blood is from the nose. Consistent with pressure trauma. But the nose itself is—"
"Intact. No breakage. No swelling." She turned and looked across the entire field. "Check more of them."
They checked more of them.
Not a single fracture. Not a single open wound. The blood on their faces and the grass stains on their uniforms told a story of violent impact, but the bodies themselves told a completely different story. Clean. Unmarked. Several of the soldiers, she noted when she got close enough to look carefully, had the specific kind of smooth skin around old scars that meant the scar tissue was no longer there.
She found a soldier with a burn scar on his left forearm that she recognized because she had been present when he got it, six months ago, gate raid gone wrong, deep second degree. The scar ran from wrist to elbow.
It was gone.
She stood there looking at the patch of completely unmarked skin where that scar had been.
"Brigadier General." Voss was at her shoulder again. "We found one who's regained consciousness."
She followed him.
Axel Krane was sitting against a broken wall on the east side of the block, forearms on his knees, looking at something in the middle distance that was not the rubble in front of him. He was breathing steadily. He had dried blood on his face and uniform. He was present in a technical sense.
Hilde had known Axel Krane for eleven years. She had served under him on three separate campaigns. She had watched him walk out of situations that should have killed a normal human being with nothing more than a split lip and an opinion about it.
She had never, in eleven years, seen him look like this.
The lights were on. He was in there. But something about the set of his face, the quality of his stillness, the particular way his eyes were not focusing on the rubble in front of him but on something much further away, made the back of her neck prick.
They called it the thousand-yard stare in the old field manuals. She had seen it on soldiers after bad gates. She had never expected to see it on Major General Axel Krane.
"Major General," she said.
He looked up at her. For a second nothing moved. Then the stare broke, imperfectly, like ice thawing in the wrong season, and he smiled at her. It was a real smile. It just had too much weight behind it.
"Faust." He raised a hand, a slow wave, almost casual. "Good timing."
"Major General." She crouched to his level. Looked at him properly. "Are you injured?"
"Physically? No, Mentally?,Yes."
She made a note of that answer and filed it away. "Can you tell me what happened here?"
Axel was quiet for a moment. He looked at the ordinary sky.
"Cultists had a Mythical-rank entity," he said.
"Near-Legendary when it finished transforming. Wilhelm. The Black Shepherd, they called him." A pause.
"He's dead."
"The block—"
"Consequence of the fight." He said it evenly, without elaboration.
"The soldiers. The state of them."
Another pause. "Mental attack from the entity. High enough rank that it hit everyone in range simultaneously. They'll recover." He looked back at her. "They already have, physically. You probably noticed."
She had noticed. The question of how was sitting in her chest like a stone she had not yet decided what to do with.
"Ralph," Axel said. His voice dropped a register. "Major General Waibel. He didn't make it. He stopped Margarethe's spawn from breaching into the residential districts." He stopped. Looked at his hands. "He's the reason no civilians died."
She said nothing for a moment.
"I'm sorry," she said finally.
Axel nodded, once, and went back to looking at whatever was in the middle distance.
She stood. Looked around at the field, the unconscious soldiers, the impossible absence of injury, the rubble, the folded glass, the skyline that was missing a block.
Then she looked back at Axel.
"Is there anything else I should know," she said.
Something moved across his face. The ghost of something that might have been amusement if the rest of the context had been different.
"No," he said. "I think that covers it."
She held his eye for a moment.
Then she turned and walked back toward Voss, who had the look of a man who had been writing things down and had run out of things to write.
"Status?" she said.
"All two hundred and thirteen accounted for and breathing. Six with elevated heart rates that need monitoring. Foam has cleared on most of them." He checked his notes. "And Brigadier General, the field medics are reporting something they want to flag."
"What."
"The soldiers. We're finding old injuries that have been healed. Not just the pressure trauma from tonight. Pre-existing injuries. Old fractures. Scar tissue that's been removed. One soldier is reporting that a persistent knee condition he's had for three years is gone." Voss paused. "And they're all showing the same dermal quality. No acne. No scarring from training environments. Clean skin. Uniform across the entire group." He paused again. "It's like something took them apart and put them back together and fixed everything while it was in there."
Hilde Faust stood in the middle of the rubble field in the early morning and looked at two hundred and thirteen unconscious soldiers who had no injuries and no scars and looked like they had been rebuilt from the inside out.
She looked at Voss.
"What the fuck," she said.
It was the most concise summary available.
She pulled her flask from her coat, uncapped it, looked at it for a second, then put it away. Not yet.
She walked back to where Axel was sitting.
"Here," she said, and held the flask out to him.
He looked up at it, then at her, then took it without ceremony and drank from it in one long pull. The sound he made afterward was the sound of a man who had been waiting for that for several hours.
"Haaaahh." He held the flask out to her. "I fucking needed that."
She took it back. "I know." She looked at the field. "Walk me through it. All of it. Everything you can tell me."
Axel told her. He was methodical about it, the way he always was with a debrief, even now. Cultist numbers, the transformation sequence, Wilhelm's ability set, the spread of divine pressure, the soldiers going down. Ralph's death. The entity's disappearance. He described it all the way a soldier describes things in a report, cleanly, without editorializing.
He did not mention the part where the soldiers had been treated. He did not mention the syringes or the surgical instruments or the forty minutes of field surgery conducted by a plague doctor with twenty tentacles while everyone present was paralyzed and conscious.
He was not going to mention that.
Nobody needed to know that. Ever.
"The physical state of the soldiers," she said.
"Consequence of the entity," Axel said. "Mythical-rank divine pressure has unpredictable effects on human physiology."
She looked at him.
He looked back at her.
She put her notebook away.
"Right," she said.
She stood there for another moment, and then reached into her other coat pocket, the one opposite the flask, and pulled out a ration pack.
"You look like you haven't eaten since yesterday." She held it out. "It's not much, but it's something."
Axel looked at it.
It was dry squid.
The packaging had a small illustration of a squid on it, eight legs and two tentacles spread out in all directions, printed in the simple flat style of military rations.
Axel went very still.
The color left his face in a way that had nothing to do with blood loss.
"You hungry, Major General?" Hilde said.
The scream that came out of Axel Krane, Iron Blood Soldier, Mythical-rank Berserker,
"GET THAT TENTACLE AWAY FROM MEEEEEEEEEEEEE!"
He was on his feet and moving before the last syllable finished, covering the distance to the edge of the block in three strides and disappearing around the corner of a standing wall with the speed of a man who had fought Mythical-rank monsters and found a squid ration more immediately threatening than any of them.
The rubble field went completely silent.
Hilde Faust stood holding the ration pack.
Her second, Voss, stood two meters to her left.
The field medics stood where they had been standing.
Everyone present looked at the empty spot where Major General Axel Krane had been.
Nobody said anything for several seconds.
Voss cleared his throat. "Should we—"
"......Give him a minute," Hilde said.