Maeve didn’t move. Didn’t blink. Didn’t even breathe for a second. Her face was a mess of sweat and pallor, the sheen of exhaustion making her look more like a fever dream than a human being.

  Then, finally, a sound. A single, flat, incredulous word that dribbled out of her mouth:

  “What?”

  Gael clicked his tongue impatiently, pressing his blade harder against her throat. “This is my condition, Exorcist. The ‘Hunter’ needs a ‘Host’, right? I’ll be your partner, but I’ve got two conditions. Ain’t nothing in life comes for free, after all, least of all from me.”

  She continued staring at him with a pointed glare, clearly trying to process whether this was a joke, a hallucination, or some cruel combination of both. Gael pressed on.

  “Condition number one,” he started, “you’ve been assigned to garrison here in this lovely, scenic slum district of Blightmarch without a mask and a partner because you’re being punished by your bosses or something, right? I reckon you don’t actually have a place to stay right now, so how about it?” He gestured grandly to the clinic around them, the walls cracked and yellowed, a faint reek of antiseptic and rust lingering in the air. “Marry me, and you get to live here, rent-free, while you do your Exorcist thing and I do my Doctor thing. We both get to live our own lives.”

  Maeve’s lips parted like she wanted to argue, but he steamrolled onward.

  “The next word that’s gonna come out of your mouth is ‘why’, so I’ll answer that for you,” he continued, thumbing at himself with a cheery grin. “I’ve been told I’m not the most welcoming guy around. Something about my mask giving people nightmares.”

  She scoffed, averting her eyes briefly. “Can’t imagine why—

  “Oh well.” His voice oozed sarcasm, though he made no move to remove his mask. “And the clinic? Drab. Uninviting. That’s what Cara tells me, anyways, so to spruce it up, I’ve been told I need to get a beautiful wife who’d be the face of the clinic from now on. A pretty face to attract patients, even if you are a blasted Exorcist who’d never usually be caught dead in a Church of Severin, abandoned or not.”

  Maeve blinked. Slowly.

  “So,” he said, lowering his voice into something almost conspiratorial, “this is the exchange. You’ll get a Host who’ll take your blood, keep you alive, and let you keep fighting those nasty little Myrmurs. In return, you’ll squat here with me and agree to be my wife. Purely for show, of course. I don’t expect you to act like my wife in private, and I don’t want you to. All you gotta do is show up sometimes, agree to be the face of the clinic, and maybe welcome patients in as the receptionist. You can at least do that much, can’t you?”

  The silence stretched.

  Then Maeve’s face twitched, as if her brain was rebooting. “You…” She trailed off, stammering, before a deep scowl carved itself across her features. “I can’t do that.”

  He clicked his tongue again. “Why not?”

  “Because,” she snapped, glaring at him with sudden intensity, “you’re wearing the mask of a Plagueplain Doctor, and I can tell that’s not a fake.”

  And there it was. Real venom. Real disdain. Not just for his mask, but for what it represented in Bharncair.

  He was used to it at this point, but he shrugged instead, unfazed.

  “What’s wrong with it?” he said. “It keeps my face warm. Also, people tend to stop arguing with me when I stare at them long enough. Haha.”

  Maeve didn’t laugh. Her grip on her briefcase tightened, knuckles whitening. “Laugh all you want. I won’t marry a dog of the church.”

  “First of all, I’m not with the fucking church, but hey, better a dog you can’t see the face of than what you’re really gonna get if you take my mask off.” He chuckled, low and dry. “Besides, do you really think you’re in a position to negotiate here? Do we really have the time to argue right now?”

  Before she could retort, the lady strapped to the surgical table behind him let out a guttural scream. The chains rattled, her bony arms pulling against the restraints with inhuman strength. Her head twisted unnaturally, veins bulging beneath gray, mottled skin, and even Gael’s arm faltered a little at the violent sound. It was taking him everything he had just to keep his blade on Maeve’s throat, and not on the actual monster behind him.

  Maeve snapped her attention to the woman, stepping forward with renewed urgency. “Move,” she mumbled, thumbing a button on the handle of her briefcase. Then she snapped it out, the case morphing into a black umbrella with a loud click. “I have to kill her now—”

  Gael narrowed his eyes, pressing his blade harder against her throat. “Not until I get a proper answer.”

  “And I’ve already given you one!” she snapped. “Everyone who has come in contact with my poison has died, and these cuffs can’t come off unless one of us loses a foot or dies outright, so no! I’m not dragging someone else down with me! I’ll kill the Myrmur alone, die, and then you can chop my leg off to free yourself for all I care!”

  “What a terrible plan.”

  “It’s my plan,” she shot back.

  “And it’s stupid,” he said, his voice rising. “You can’t beat her alone. Look at yourself, Exorcist. You’re running on fumes. You need to drain your blood.”

  She gritted her teeth, the umbrella shaking in her hand. “I’ll manage.”

  “Yeah?” he challenged. “And when you collapse mid-fight because of toxin overdose? Great strategy, genius. Is there such a thing as an Exorcist Academy? What do they even teach you there?”

  She clicked her tongue loudly. “What do you not understand, Plagueplain Doctor? My blood’s toxic. Too toxic. I don’t even know why the cuff automatically snapped to your ankle when you kissed me, because I most certainly didn’t want it to snatch up an innocent passerby, but my point remains that you don’t stand a chance in hell against my bloo—”

  “Try me.”

  Maeve froze, her glare faltering.

  “Shadefang, Alchemist’s Bane, Daggerleaf Draught, Blackmirth, Gulch Oil,” he said slowly, his tone sharp and cutting. “I can name a hundred more, a thousand more, ten thousand more—I’ve spent years injecting every last poison and toxin I could get my hands on into my veins. Do you think your blood’s gonna be anything special? What’s a little more poison to someone like me?”

  And for the first time—the first time for real—she hesitated.

  Behind them, the lady screamed again, louder, her body convulsing violently against the chains. Maeve gritted her teeth, glaring at him like he was the devil incarnate, but the way her eyes flicked between him and the lady, he already knew what her answer was going to be.

  Still, he grumbled internally. Am I just that undesirable that she literally has to contemplate between life and death?

  “... Fine,” she finally hissed. “Okay. I’ll marry you. I’ll live here and do receptionist work sometimes. Just move out of the way—”

  “Great, but not so fast.”

  Her jaw clenched as she tried to push his blade away from her throat. “What?”

  He didn’t budge. “I said there were two conditions,” he said plainly, raising two of his fingers. “As long as I’m your Host and you’re my Hunter, you’re not allowed to murk any humans. Not even if they’ve been parasitized by a Myrmur.”

  She blinked. Once. Twice. Then she stared at him like he’d lost whatever scraps of sanity he had left.

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  “That’s not how this works,” she said, sounding more and more irritated with him by the second. “The Exorcist’s Purity Mandate: ‘mercy is a lie the weak tell themselves. The curses do not spare, and neither do we’. Once a Myrmur enters its Host, it buries its heart inside them, and its main body can’t die as long as its real heart is hidden inside its Host. You can decapitate it, burn it, crush it to minced meat, and it’ll regenerate no matter what. The only way to kill the Myrmur is by destroying its heart—”

  “Or by removing it from the Host, and then you murk the Myrmur—”

  “Won’t work,” she cut in. “We’ve tried. Hundreds and thousands of times. If you try to remove its heart, it’ll kill the Host in retaliation. That’s why we always kill the Host first, so the Myrmurs can’t use them as shields.”

  “But have you guys really tried? The way I will?”

  Maeve looked ready to club him with her umbrella, but he pressed ahead, grinning up at her.

  “Here’s the deal, Exorcist,” he said. “You do your job. You drive the Myrmur out, fight it, distract it, whatever you have to do. Just buy me time, and I’ll save the Host. I’ll remove the Myrmur’s heart without killing her.”

  “You don’t even know what its heart looks like,” she said flatly. “How would you—

  “Because I ain’t bullshitting anyone when I said I’d be the greatest doctor in all of Bharncair,” he countered plainly, glancing over his shoulder and narrowing his eyes at a small, rolling flask of glowing green liquid under the surgical table, “and I just so happen to have a special elixir that may or may not be able to remove the Myrmur’s heart safely, but here’s the real question I don’t really care to know the answer to: don’t you have a dream you’re too embarrassed to tell anyone?”

  He raised a brow as she looked away quickly, knowing he’d hit the nail right on the head.

  “Well, I ain’t embarrassed to say mine,” he said, shrugging slightly. “I will be the greatest doctor in Bharncair and make this clinic the best there ever was, so breaking the Bloodless Mandate is non-negotiable. I will do no harm. There will be no killing humans, and no human deaths inside my clinic—so either you agree to my second condition, or you jump out of my window and die outside. I’ll find a way to heal the Host and fight off the Myrmur at the same time by myself.”

  Maeve’s teeth ground together audibly.

  Gael stayed quiet, watching her wrestle with the decision. He wasn’t worried. Not anymore. He could see it in the way her shoulders sagged, the slight twitch of her fingers on the umbrella’s handle.

  She was going to agree.

  And eventually, she looked straight ahead at him, her long bangs falling over her face and shrouding her eyes.

  “... I detest all Plagueplain Doctors who wear that mask,” she muttered under her breath, clenching her jaw hard. “You’re all curses upon Bharncair. Wretches who couldn’t defend the Saintess. Murderous warlords who sweep through entire districts in the name of ‘research’, leaving crystallised sculptures of men, women, and children in your wake. You’d barely even bat an eye as a little girl grabs your leg, screaming at you to turn her friends and family back to normal, so I’d sooner kill all of you myself than play happy-go-lucky marriage with you.”

  “And I detest all you silver-tongued Exorcists as well,” he sneered back, giving her his brightest, cheeriest smile yet. “You don’t heal people. You don’t exorcise shit. You murk the Myrmur and the Host, and after you finish the job? You barely even give the little boy whose mother you just slaughtered right in front of his eyes a small smile, saying it’s going to be okay, so the feeling’s mutual. I’d sooner bury myself six feet under than blow you a goodnight kiss.”

  Maeve raised her eyes to meet his, and hers were sharp. Unrelenting. Focused like never before.

  He wanted nothing less than that.

  “Can you… really save her?” she asked quietly, looking behind him at the screaming, twisting lady.

  He smiled. Not a reassuring smile—more like a madman who’d just found the final piece to his puzzle. “Of course. I am the Doctor in this professional relationship, after all.”

  Maeve was silent for a little while longer, her gaze distant and troubled as she looked him in the eye, but when she finally exhaled sharply and muttered, there was something almost imperceptible in her voice.

  Relief, perhaps, at the thought that for once—for the very first time in her life as an Exorcist—she wouldn’t have to kill the Host alongside the Myrmur.

  “... Let’s get this over with,” she said quietly.

  His smile turned into a full-blown smirk as he pulled his blade away. “Lovely. I now pronounce us... uh, something. I ain’t been to any weddings before.”

  Then he whirled around, turned his blade, and stood by her side as they narrowed their eyes at the surgical table. The chains, belts, and buckles were just barely keeping the lady down, and Maeve grimaced, taking one step closer to the table as she exhaled deeply.

  Gael felt it immediately: the sudden rush of something sharp and fiery coursing through him. He glanced down to see the links of the chain connecting their ankles glowing faintly green. Her blood was draining through the chain and into his body, burning like acid in his veins.

  His knees buckled slightly, but he caught himself quickly, leaning against the doorway.

  “Oh, this is fun,” he muttered, feeling sweat bead down his brow as Maeve bit her lip, looking at him anxiously. He gave her a tense smile in response. “What are you looking at me for, Exorcist? This ain’t enough to murk me. Not nearly close enough. I feel just peachy.”

  Her eyes lingered on him, skeptical, but she didn’t push.

  “So,” he said, trying to shift focus as he cracked his neck and rolled his shoulders,“just so I know what I’m really in for, how do these fights usually go?”

  She kept her gaze fixed on the woman on the table, tightening her grip on her umbrella like a blade. “Normally, the Hunter fights the Myrmur itself while the Exorcist Host fights the Myrmur Host. Once the Myrmur Host is killed—meaning, its heart is destroyed—the Hunter uses their biomagic to finish off and execute the Myrmur. Nothing about this is any different… except, of course, you’re not going to be killing anyone.”

  “Right,” he said. “I’m just over here doing the impossible. No big deal.”

  Maeve spared him a sideways glance, then turned back to the lady. “I’ll fight the Myrmur. You focus on saving the Host—”

  “Wait,” he said, holding up a finger. “Hold on. When we first... you know, chained together, I saw something. A message interface or... something. That’s the ‘Symbiotic System’ thing only people with classes can see, right?”

  Maeve frowned. “What?”

  “You know,” he said, waving his hands in the air like he could conjure the thing back. “The legendary Symbiotic System. The envy of all classless men. The biomagic, the mutations, the whole package. Since we’re connected now, does that mean I also have a class? Shit, do I also get biomagic now? How do I use it?”

  She blinked for a few seconds before snapping her fingers, and then, as if on cue, a translucent interface materialised between their heads.

  Gael squinted at it, reading the single message:

  [System integration for new Host and Hunter in progress. Your eleven organ systems are currently resynchronizing with the bioarcanic essence of this class. You will be unable to control your system-enhanced strength properly until resynchronization is complete]

  [Estimated time remaining: Ten minutes]

  “Ten minutes?” he said, frowning. “That’s forever.”

  Maeve didn’t look thrilled, either. She waved the interface away with an annoyed huff. “It means neither of us can access our status interface yet. My attribute levels are also a bit higher than the average human’s, but since the system is still synchronizing all the biological functions in my body, I won’t be able to control my system-enhanced strength properly. I don’t have the spinal reflexes or the enhanced motor functions for it. I’m basically a normal human right now.”

  “And that ‘Essence Art’ thing? Can’t you use it?”

  “I can’t use my biomagic either. I can’t control it well without the system synchronizing all of my bodily functions, so if I try to use it—and I could, I suppose—I’ll kill us all with it.”

  “Well, that’s just great,” he mumbled. Then he paused, her words playing back in his head again. “Wait. ‘Our’ status interface? Don’t you get one of your own and I get mine—”

  “The Myrmur is waking up,” she said, her tone sharp as she glared forward at the writhing lady. “For the next ten minutes, we'll be on our own. No biomagic. No mutations. Nothing. My attribute levels aren’t high enough to deal with an F-Rank Wretch-Class easily, either, so this is going to be tough.”

  “Fantastic,” he muttered. “Well, anything else I should know?”

  “You have ten minutes to save the Host. If you can’t remove the Myrmur’s heart safely before I regain full control of my biomagic again, I’ll have no choice but to kill them both for the sake of our safety. That’s my condition for accepting you as my Host. Non-negotiable.”

  He grinned. “Deal.”

  Maeve’s gaze lingered on him for a moment, her lips pressed into a thin line.

  Before either of them could get chicken feet about this whole thing, though, the chains securing the lady to the surgical table snapped. The sound was sharp, metallic, and entirely too final.

  Both of them stepped back cautiously as the Myrmur began slithering out of her belly button.

  It started as a single flesh and blood tendril at first, slick red and black, and then the tendril spiderwebbed outwards like the roots of a living tree, coiling and uncoiling. The flesh and blood coagulated into a bulbous and glistening head, into a segmented body glistening with bile. It resembled a human-shaped fly two metres tall, and its two tiny, black eyes stared at them with malevolent intelligence as it stood atop the gasping lady’s stomach on the tip of its toes.

  Immediately, its killing pressure hit Gael’s face like a wave.

  Maeve raised her umbrella in both hands, poising it before her like a blade, while he exhaled and tried to steady his nerves.

  His target was that symbiote elixir flask rolling back and forth under the surgical table.

  Alright, you fucking wretch.

  Round two.