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Eldritch Horror? No, I'm A Doctor
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Ren sat down behind the reception desk, reached up, and took the mask off.
He set it on the desk in front of him and looked at it for a moment, the black beak and the dark lenses looking back at nothing. Then he leaned back in the chair, pressed his palms against his face, and thought about the two choices Malvick Siven had just handed him.
System, he thought. I need your input.
On what.
On the situation. Malvick Siven just left. He gave me two options. Join the military as a Major General under his direct command and only treat soldiers from now on, or leave the Empire entirely. I have until tomorrow morning.
A pause.
Why are you asking me.
Because I need to think it through and you have access to combat data I don't.
Are you mentally deficient.
Ren blinked. Excuse me?
The answer is obvious. You flee. What is there to think about? Pack your things and leave tonight.
He said he would not pursue me across borders.
Oh great, the Legendary-rank hunter promised not to chase you. I feel very safe. Do you know what Legendary rank means? It means demigod. It means the rules of engagement that apply to every other living thing do not fully apply to him. And you are sitting here asking me whether to negotiate with one.
I am not saying negotiate. I am saying the military option has some practical advantages.
Name one.
Stability. A legal status in the Empire. Protection.
Protection from what? He is the thing you need protection from. You do not get protected from a person by working for them. That is called being employed, which is not the same thing.
I would still be able to practice medicine.
On soldiers only. You would spend the rest of your operating life as a military asset. Is that what you came here for?
Ren was quiet.
Let me walk you through this simply, the System continued. Your Dominion of Crawling Madness, your strongest domain ability, functions by generating fear response in targets. It works on humans. It works on most hunter-class entities. It does not work on a Legendary-rank hunter because a Legendary-rank hunter has the psychological fortification of something approaching a demigod. The domain would open and he would look at it the way you look at a slightly cloudy day.
So in a fight I lose.
In a fight you lose badly and possibly permanently. Yes. There is no version of that engagement that ends well for you. You are strong. You are considerably stronger than your registered rank suggests. But strong and Legendary are not the same category. They are not even in the same conversation.
What if I had more time to prepare.
You have until tomorrow morning. That is not more time. That is less time than you need for anything useful.
Ren picked up the mask and looked at it.
Fine, he said. I go back to Qintara.
Was that so difficult.
Can the clinic be transferred? Stored somehow?
The entire building can be stored in the System inventory. All of it.
The whole building.
The whole building. However, anything inside when stored risks damage from the compression process. Equipment, instruments, materials, all of it needs to be in your personal inventory first before I store the structure.
How long will that take.
Depends on how much you have accumulated. Probably close to three hours if you are thorough.
Fine. I will start now and store the building after.
Try to be thorough. You have expensive things in there.
Ren put the mask back on and got to work.
He started with the Outer God Surgical Set, pulling each instrument from its case and storing it piece by piece into the inventory. Then the cases themselves, the materials, the reagents, everything on the shelves in the examination room. He worked through the ground floor methodically, clearing surfaces and storage spaces and every drawer behind the reception desk. Then upstairs, his personal items, books, supplies, everything that had accumulated over months of staying somewhere long enough to stop noticing what was there.
It took time. More than he had expected, because there was more than he had remembered.
By four in the morning the clinic was stripped bare. Furniture, walls, sign above the door. Everything else was in inventory. He stood in the empty waiting room and looked at the black walls and the empty desk and thought about storing the structure next, and then sleeping for two hours, and then being gone before anyone arrived to find a gap in the street where a clinic used to be.
He reached out to the System.
Ready to store the structure.
Confirmed. Initiating—
The banging started.
Four hard knocks. Then four more. Then four more after that, the rhythm of someone who had given up on being reasonable about it a while ago and was now operating on urgency alone.
Ren closed the System prompt, crossed the empty waiting room, and pulled the front door open hard enough that it swung back against the wall.
"Do you know how early it is?" he said. "Do you have any idea what time it is right now? There is no injury that requires attention at half past five in the morning that cannot wait until six. If you are bleeding, apply pressure. If you are not bleeding, go home and come back at a normal hour like a normal person—"
He stopped.
Steven Bright and Axel Krane stood in the doorway. Steven's eyepatch was slightly crooked, like he had put it on in a hurry. Axel had not shaved. Neither of them looked like men who had slept. Both of them looked like men who had received a piece of information very recently and had not yet finished processing it.
Their faces were pale.
"Dr. Nox," Axel said. His voice was completely level in the way that voices go level when the person speaking has actively chosen to make it so. "You need to run. Right now."
Ren looked at them.
"What," he said.