Chapter 6: The Price of Miracles
POV: Adam
Two months underground and the pump station had become legend in whispered conversations throughout the QZ. "The surgeon who saves the unsaveable." Adam hadn't wanted the reputation, but three cured Firefly operatives had talked, and word spread through the underground network like infection through blood.
Now his clinic door received constant midnight knocks—Firefly operatives carrying wounded comrades, civilians who'd exhausted FEDRA's limited mercy, refugees who'd heard rumors of miraculous healing in the sewers beneath Sector 7.
Each success built a legend he couldn't escape. Each choice of who to treat first weighed heavier on his shoulders.
Detection showed him the impossible choice approaching before they even reached his clinic: three patients dying simultaneously in different tunnel sections. Three separate medical emergencies. Twenty minutes until the closest one bled out.
He could only reach one in time.
"This is the nightmare. This is what the Hippocratic Oath never prepared anyone for."
The child with the infected leg—eight years old, amputation surgery he could perform in his sleep, guaranteed save. Easy.
The Firefly lieutenant with the chest wound—medium difficulty, punctured lung and internal bleeding, but leadership value to the resistance. Strategic importance.
The random refugee with the late-stage bite—nearly impossible save requiring all his power, no faction affiliation, no strategic worth except being human.
Adam's modern medical ethics screamed to save the child first. Firefly logic demanded the lieutenant. His sworn oath said try for all three.
"Who decides who lives? Who gave me the right to play god with people's lives?"
"But if I don't decide, they all die. Someone has to choose. Someone always has to choose."
The arithmetic was brutal and simple: save one, lose two. Or try to save all and lose everyone to hesitation.
He chose the child.
First Form: Serpentinite Bipolar took the infected leg cleanly. Counter Shock sterilized the wound. Shambles positioned her for optimal recovery. Seven minutes of surgery. One life saved.
When he reached the lieutenant fifteen minutes later, the man had bled out alone in a tunnel that smelled like rust and failure.
The refugee was already turning when Adam found him. Mercy kill. Quick and clean.
Marlene's reaction was coldly pragmatic acceptance. "You saved who you could save. That's all anyone can do."
Adam blamed himself anyway. The lieutenant's death felt carved into his chest—weight that Detection couldn't map, pain that Counter Shock couldn't heal.
Numbers game. Triage calculus. The mathematics of playing god in an apocalypse.
"I came here to save people. But every choice means someone dies. How many times can I make that choice before it breaks me?"
Rage and guilt drove him to the training tunnels at 3 AM, practicing sword forms with a scavenged blade until his hands bled through enhanced durability.
Form Two: Upper Smash had always broken his rhythm, power fluctuating as concentration wavered. But tonight, fury channeled through Stone Breathing's controlled patterns, emotion becoming fuel rather than distraction.
The power clicked.
Stone energy flowed from his core through perfectly synchronized breathing. Muscle and bone hardened beyond human limits. The sewer tunnel around him suddenly felt fragile as spun glass.
Upper Smash exploded upward with force that shattered concrete like paper. The ceiling cracked. Pipes burst. Water rained down in torrents that tasted like metal and old dreams.
Stone Skin held for a full minute—muscle and flesh becoming living armor that could turn bullets. He wasn't just copying anime techniques anymore. He was understanding them. Mastering them. Becoming something beyond human in a world that had already moved beyond human limitations.
But the echo attracted something.
Clicks reverberated through the tunnels. Slow, measured, searching. Adam's Detection painted the creature's approach in stark detail—elongated head, fungal growths covering eyes that no longer worked, echolocation mapping its environment through sound.
A Clicker. The first he'd encountered face-to-face since his initial Runner kill.
"This is different. Runners charge. Clickers hunt."
His heart hammered despite enhanced physiology as the thing approached through darkness. Detection versus echolocation—two supernatural senses painting the same tunnel in different ways.
It charged with inhuman speed.
Stone Skin activated reflexively as teeth designed to crush bone met flesh hardened beyond normal limits. The Clicker's jaw cracked audibly. Its clicking intensified with confusion and rage.
First Form: Serpentinite Bipolar flowed like water around its desperate swipes. The scavenged blade, guided by perfect technique and enhanced by Stone Breathing energy, took its head cleanly.
The creature's body hit the tunnel floor with a wet thud.
But the noise echoed. And Detection lit up with signatures throughout the deep tunnels—dozens of infected stirring in response to combat sounds. A horde waking from dormancy, drawn by the promise of living flesh.
Adam ran.
Through passages that Detection mapped in real-time. Past sleeping infected clusters. Around structural damage from his training accident. Up emergency ladders toward the surface world where humans pretended civilization still existed.
Understanding hit him with brutal clarity: every power use had consequences. Stone Breathing wasn't just sword techniques—it was force that could bring down buildings. Detection wasn't just enhanced senses—it was constant awareness of how dangerous the world had become. The Ope Ope no Mi wasn't just surgical precision—it was godlike power that exhausted him to the point of collapse.
Abilities that felt instinctive required mastery he didn't have time to develop safely. Every training session risked exposure. Every surgery drained stamina he might need for survival. Every choice to help meant choosing not to help someone else.
He emerged from the tunnels gasping, enhanced lungs working overtime to process the cleaner air. Tess waited in the shadows with supplies and questions written across her face.
"You're the surgeon they talk about."
Statement, not question. She'd figured it out. Probably had for weeks.
"Yeah." Too tired to lie well. Too empty to construct elaborate cover stories.
She sat beside him on the concrete barrier that separated the underground world from the surface one. Her presence felt solid, grounding, real in a way that supernatural abilities couldn't match.
"Teach me to fight like you."
The request caught him off guard. Everyone else wanted healing. Wanted miracles. Wanted him to save them from the consequences of living in hell.
She wanted to learn to fight hell back.
"It's not that simple," he said.
"Nothing's simple anymore. But you move different. Fight different. Survive things that should kill you." Her eyes held steady determination. "I want to learn."
"Can I teach abilities I don't fully understand myself? Stone Breathing that comes from muscle memory I never earned? Detection that feels like borrowed instinct? The Ope Ope no Mi that operates on principles I can barely comprehend?"
But looking at Tess—young, determined, refusing to be just another victim in a world designed to create them—Adam felt something shift in his chest. Maybe teaching would force him to understand his own abilities better. Maybe sharing the burden would make it bearable.
Maybe he didn't have to carry the weight of being the only miracle in Boston's darkness.
"First lesson," he said quietly. "Power means responsibility. Every choice has consequences. Every life you save means choosing not to save someone else."
She nodded gravely. "I already know that part. Teach me the rest."
And in the shadows beneath Boston's quarantine zone, surrounded by the smell of rust and hope, Adam began teaching someone else to breathe stones.
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