The abrupt swelling of the ooze in the man’s eye was gross. It never stopped being gross. She usually managed to extract the sick stuff from them before a surge happened. They’d been happening more recently. Vic grimaced as the eye lost its sickly hue. Damn. That illness really had an obsession with overtaking eyes. So gross.

  “Sorry for the pus of the last one,” Vic said while her eye twitched. She was two steps away from Karah now, while she worked after she’d finished “purifying” the man. She turned a little more away, to stare at the remaining sick.

  “…Should have told you that they surge out like that sometimes, sorry.”

  She didn’t know if she wanted to forget more about the pus implosions or the naked bodies. She was never going to unsee any of that.

  “It’s… fine. I don’t mind that you pushed me out of the way, I get it now.”

  Vic didn’t look behind her to get a glance of her. She’d kind of shoved her hard against the wall while getting between the bursting ooze and her, all while adding layers of shadow armour to have her body take more space. Her reaction time hadn’t been slow this time, contrary to what she’d been told about herself in the past hours, but the reaction itself had been a bit out of proportions. Just another light fuck up in her long strings of accidental fuck ups, not even the worst kind. Vic glanced back while pretending to rub her eyes. The shadow armour melded together to let her naked fingers come to her eyes. Damn, her eyelids were dropping easily. No matter.

  Karah just looked tired.

  “Are you alright?” Vic asked. Karah blinked a few times like she was trying to keep herself focused. She stared back at Vic.

  “Oh… I’m… soon going to run out of mana,” Karah said a bit numbly. Oh. Already? “I think I can only heal two more. It’s never safe to run out of mana anyway. But more than that, it’s just… exhausting to keep this sort of focus for a long period of time.”

  Vic blinked back once. Her head had tilted itself.

  “Have you told anyone that they do… this?” Karah asked. “It’s the first time I hear of it happening. It wasn’t in the evening report.” She was eyeing the three sick people left in the cubicle. There was still the gelatinous pus on the ground from before. So unsanitary.

  “Huh?” Vic said. Wait, what had been the question? Oh. Oh the surges, right. She’d asked about the surges, hadn’t she? “I… think so? Pretty sure a couple people had to see them happen. Though…”

  Oh yeah. The really explosive kinds happened more rarely. When had they last done so? Vic scratched the back of her head. The ache had rescinded after a while, but her vision was now very blurry most of the time, but only at the corner of her eyes.

  The weirdest thing about the surges was that they didn’t kill the carrier. No one had died because of them. She’d expected… worse. So much worse.

  “Vic?” Karah said. Vic blinked back at her. The wall behind Karah had patterns that ever so slightly shifted where the mortar met another brick. “Do you need me to repeat the question?”

  “Huh? No, you were asking about the surges, right?” Vic chuckled to lighten the mood. Karah frowned.

  “I… had done so. But… after that, I asked you if you’d rather go sleep, or if you’d prefer to… keep going. I was asking you to come with me if you chose that. I’d rather bring you to another healer than have them come. I… don’t think leaving you alone is a good idea.”

  Vic took some time to digest the words.

  Maybe she should rest. Her throat felt a bit parched. She’d lost count long ago of how many bodies she’d extracted the illness from. She’d kind of been forced to expedite the methods to ensure she didn’t lose more mana than she gained while working because of the upkeep of the spell. Expediting the process… it’d been good, she’d been efficient. So many done… So many… So many left to do, yet. That feeling of hollowness in her chest deepened again.

  “Just one more,” Vic said, licking her dry lips. Karah let out a light breath through her teeth, smiling a tiny little.

  Vic moved to the next… woman. She crouched down to the cot there. She briefly stared at her face, that was deformed with huge bumps. Right. Hah! Now she had an excuse for not remembering the people she’d taken care of. Yeah. She’d chosen the cubicle that was filled with incurables that had gone ignored for too long. Apparently this corner was for the too sick. She chose who she healed now. Yeah. Randomly. Somewhat randomly. As it should be.

  The patient was staring at her emptily. The sclera of her eyes had that extremely sickened hue. She’d had to start with the face. She didn’t want imploded eyes, nope nope. Ooze no more, ah hah. Her tiny lightsaber made quick work of it. Repetitive, it was. It didn’t matter.

  [Advanced reaction time: auto-activated], the game interface blinked.

  The interface was all glitched.

  Vic stared down at it. Her finger slowly raised to wipe it away, but where she touched the pop up notification, the polychromatic glitch spread out. The window abruptly yeeted left so fast that it was gone out of sight so quickly that she barely had the time to perceive the motion.

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  Oh. Vic flinched.

  Right behind it, there’d been the head’s patient. She could stare at the sick person that she’d been working on. Her bulbous deformed pimples had partially opened. But they weren’t leaking. She was getting a slow-mo show of how surges happened. Vic gulped down slowly. The sickly orange hued pus was about to arc through the air. Huh. There were some specks of shiny stuff in it barely flickering in and off.

  Vic stared down. Right. She… What could she do? She was already put in place between Karah and the splattering pus, yet again, but without trying, this time.

  Huh… Her shadow armour was already on… with several layers. There was no obvious path to take. Honestly… what to do…

  Ah fuck, the left eye still had that swollen eyelid. The patient was going to lose the eye, probably, if she let the pus concentrate and implode out, and that was very much happening. She could see the growth, right there. Vic moved to put her pinprick into the big opening pimple right next to it. Huh. Her pinprick… it really was like a tiny lightsaber. At this speed, she could see the way it wavered, how seamlessly it split the flesh. But up close, the pinprick had tiny, very tiny hairs of pure light wavering through the air. She plugged the surging pimple. Silly stuff. Her head continued to tilt. It was so weird to see it all at work. The inner part of the magic pinprick intensified to an absurd point, but she could see its inward flow.

  Damn. And below there, there were specs in the surrounding pus. Specs of gold in the ooze were speckling, barely perceptible even at this speed. And yet, her mana bar was making a curious, tiny but visible upward jump. That changed from the usual very slow build-up that had taken place after the unusually big initial mana points she’d been getting from this whole thing… She’d really thought that she’d regain her full mana bar because of how well it seemed to be going at first… but it had turned out… kind of disappointing. And…

  Oh… Wait… Was this like an extra mini-game? Was she supposed to strike right as surges happened, to get the extra bit of mana? Huh… it felt weirdly unethical to get even more mana from these people that way. Her frown deepened as she heard experience points pop.

  Another window opened on its own.

  [[Cunning hunter] title is close to evolving!]

  Vic stared down at it. She barely registered it when it glitched out on its own. She blinked, and the game interface had switched around. Her menu interface had gotten shoved to her feet right before slotting back into its usual place, while her spell default window had glitched out before reappearing right as normal.

  What the fuck.

  She did nothing, first opening her mouth but quickly realising that that was useless, so she stopped the motion. She waited a bit to see if anything else happened. Nothing seemed to do so.

  After a moment, nothing had happened. The surging ooze was still flying through the air, moving little by little.

  Kind of… pretty. The gliding pus didn’t look so gross at this speed.

  She slowly frowned. The air was sort of deformed around the oozing, opened pimples. Was that the… corrupted divine mana that her aspected spell was producing? Was that what made the pimples implode? Did corrupted divine mana make the pus overreact? No, no… that didn’t make sense. The room she’d used for half a day was filled with that, and that place hadn’t had that many surge issues with patients and even more than that, if that was what really was causing them, there wouldn’t be any happening in the cubicles that were open to the air and had less people in them- no, if it’d been the case, they would have been so much more of them… Something else… Something else.

  Vic’s eyelids were ever so slightly dropping. Her vision crept up to the patient’s eyes. They were… jittery, while staring at her. Huh…

  “Hi t h e r e”, she started motioning, with her mouth. If that stupid gooner of a god was staring through the eyes of the sick, she could possibly try to trashtalk it. There was no reason not to at least try that. Yeah.

  The sickened look on that face faded as her pinprick finished extracting the bad stuff there. The light in the eyes of the patient dimmed. Close to the pinprick, she saw the air deformation waver. The experience points made their popping sounds, as usual. Little fireworks at the background of her mind.

  The surge had been contained. Her fingers removed the pinprick from the purified, deformed flesh. She blinked. That had been… unusually quick. She stared again at the eyes of the patient. The eyes were giving her a half-lidded stare.

  Vic managed to catch a glimpse in the corner of her eyes. Another glitched window, which flew by too fast to catch what it contained.

  She felt that hollowness again.

  [Advanced reaction time: deactivated], the game interface blinked.

  Vic flinched back. An intense pain burst through her brain. She brought her hands to her face, barely avoiding shoving the pinprick against her own self. The sharpness was like shrapnel. Her hands clenched tightly.

  “Vic?!” she heard. Vic breathed heavily. She’d been on her knees. Fuck. Fuck.

  She kept the scream inside. She hit the ground once, and instead of doing it repeatedly, she kept control of herself and clenched it tightly, just a few centimetres above the ground. Her eye twitched.

  “Vic, what- what was that, what-,” she said. “Vic? Vic!”

  “That’s my na-aa,” she said. “…aame,” she finished. Like biting in a lemon. A-ah. Ah.

  “Vic?” Karah said. She was close.

  “Tell me what just happened,” Vic asked, hands against her eyes. There were like ants on her eyes, but it crawled deeper than that. “For you. Tell me what I did.”

  “You… moved… in an unnatural way,” she said. “Jerked forwards. Precise. You were precise.” The worry tainted her voice. No, it wasn’t worry. Vic clenched her eyes tightly. The ants wouldn’t leave her eyes. “You… Wait, Vic, you purified it all? Already?”

  Karah’s shocked voice was being projected towards the patient. She’d turned her head away from Vic.

  “I’m going to sleep. I need the break,” Vic said. “I can’t keep going. I can’t. You were right. All of you. You’re all right. I have to sleep, to rest. I can’t keep going.”

  Karah didn’t reply.

  Vic got up.

  “Vic? What happened? Why… Are you sure?”

  She stared back at Karah, opening her eyes after having failed again to get the sensation of the crawling ants to leave.

  Karah’s eyes widened. This was such a bad coincidence. The eyes. The sparkly eyes. She couldn’t get them to stop crawling, the ants, the ants.

  “…Vic, what…” Karah stopped. Her mouth slowly closed. She was perfectly too still. Her hands were behind her back.

  “It’s not the same thing,” Vic said, pointing at her eyes.

  “Alright,” Karah whispered.