Accelerate was still running when John emerged from the teleport, and so he was able to get a slow motion view of what was happening. What he saw set his blood boiling.

The trees in the little copse where he left Curtis and Claire were skinny and leafless, with skeletal limbs branching off at angles. The ground was dry from lack of rain. Distantly, he had the mildly dissociative thought that the burning sky would be wreaking havoc on the global ecology. Roots were poking out of the dirt, looking desiccated and weak.

These thoughts were mere distractions from the problem at hand. More important than the health of the wildlife was the patch of red that surrounded Claire's body where she lay. The girl was as skinny as the trees and far more pale. Her frail limbs trembled with the effort of holding off a woman wearing an armless chest plate over solid steel leggings.

Worse was the state of her gown. She wore a typical hospital gown over black-and-white chequered pyjama bottoms, with fluffy slippers to complete her outfit. All of them were stained with blood. All of them were torn in multiple places, the fabric split neatly by something sharp.

The culprit was clutched in the armoured woman's hands. Said woman was straddling the younger girl's torso, pushing down with a curved knife. The knife itself looks like something out of a fantasy movie. Black as obsidian, it curved over itself like a snake coiled to strike. Its edges were stained red, and he could see little scraps of fabric clinging to the flat, stuck there by bloody adhesive.

Claire was sick and had been for a long time. She was weak and frail as a child half her age. A stiff breeze could've overpowered her. Thus, it was obvious that the woman had to be toying with her. Judging by all the cuts already crossing her body, it wasn't as if Claire actually had the power to stop her. People could have bursts of strength when running on adrenaline, but there were limits to that, and Claire had no system to fall back on for superhuman feats.

So this little show must have been all for the benefits of the cloaked man currently attempting to drag himself across the dirt with one arm. The other arm was a bloody wreck of pulp. The great black wings extending from his back were also covered with lacerations, weeping buckets of black blood by the second. There were dozens of cuts covering his cloak too. A dark stain trailed from his body to a point a few metres behind him.

John took this all in within a single heartbeat. His mind worked in overdrive. The battle between him and the other four couldn't have lasted for more than 15 seconds at most. He couldn't believe that this woman has done this much damage in such a short length of time.

Had it been a setup? Was their assault some elaborate rules to lure him away and give this woman a time to work? But why? Why would they focus on distracting him? They had no reason to believe he was the more dangerous presence in the hospital.

All these questions flashed through his mind in another heartbeat. In a third heartbeat, he simultaneously dismissed them all and attacked.

While his Sanguine Clone focused its efforts on stalling the other four, Flash step carried him across the little clearing between the trees. When he emerged, he had his scythe ready. He swung it in a great arc. His knowledge of how to reap crops might have been lacking, but his duellist skill allowed him to utilise the weapon well enough.

Accelerate was still active, so he was able to watch in slow motion as the illusionist woman reacted just in time to meet his attack. To him, it looked as though she was moving only just slower than a regular person. She must have had some kind of or Augmented time ability similar to his own.

But hers was inferior.

She turned her body and tried to deflect his attack with her knife. To her credit, she partially succeeded. Sparks flew between the two weapons as they scraped against one another. His attack was deflected.

And so his blade scored a deep gash on her chest plate and her upper right arm rather than opening her throat. Her cry of pain was in slow motion but still deeply satisfying.

The next moment, she twisted away, and rolled off of Claire. The moment she was clear of the young girl, the edges of her body turned hazy, and a mirage rose from nothing to partially conceal her position. With the air growing more and more distorted as her spell increased its power, John figured he had an idea of how this woman fought and thought.

Obviously, she had snuck past him to get here. It seemed like this ability would steadily increase its strength until it went from a distortion in the air all the way to something close to true invisibility. He had never caught a hint of her sneaking past him, after all.

But he wasn't going to let her get that far now. Another flash step had him catch up to her. An overhead slash slammed down on the Mirage in the approximate place he suspected her to be. It passed through only empty air and stabbed deep into the ground, jarring his arms from the impact. That was fine. All part of the plan.

The scythe vanished back into his inventory, and John carried the momentum of the attack to slam his fist down into the ground. He only let Earthquake activate for a second. It was enough.

Cracks spiderwebbed out for only a metre or so. Small fissures gaped open. The world gave a brief lurch. Catfall and his Agility stat let him keep his balance, and even then it was a close thing. Without pre-warning, he would've gone sprawling to the ground. He couldn't imagine anyone else in the vicinity would have been so lucky.

The Mirage shifted to accommodate for its casters new position, sinking lower to the ground and condensing in a smaller area. As expected, the woman had been knocked off her feet. Her mirage meant nothing if her escape had been cut off.

Soul Vision activated, giving him a silver outline of the woman's position, and he threw a punch with all his strength behind it. Iron Fist and Limit Break activated at the same time, turning the blow to a savage strike right at the woman's skull. Even with her disadvantage, she almost got her hands up in time—her version of Accelerate must have been high level.

But it didn't matter. Almost was the operative word there, and his knuckles connected with her skull, accompanied with a satisfying crack. Her head snapped back, the back of her skull slamming against the ground to add extra injury to injury, on top of the insult. She let out a grunt of pain, distorted by Accelerate, and swiped blindly with her knife, hoping to counter, buy herself distance.

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But John wasn't there anymore. A weak Flash Step took him to her other side, where he immediately launched a savage kick to the back of her skull. It connected, sending her sprawling. Her grip on her knife loosened, and his next kick aimed for her hand, sending the blade flying from her fingers, spinning off into the dirt.

Some small, distant part of John's brain registered that the woman was defeated, helpless. She was without her weapon, her illusionary spell was useless, and she was moving as if dizzy, concussed, flailing around like she wasn't completely aware of where she was.

But it was hard for that little voice of reason inside him to make itself heard over the blood rushing in his ears. He could still see Claire's feeble form in the corner of his vision. The cuts all up and down her body, her laboured breathing, the tears streaming down her face from her eyes clenched shut in pain. Even now, she was trying to push herself upwards, to make her way over to her father, who himself was still trying to drag himself through the mud to his daughter.

John had never been one to believe in Karma. How could he, when so many people got away with treating him like shit without any consequences, from the world or otherwise? But a sense of justice and vengeance inhabited him in that moment, and he knew that the world wouldn't be right again until this sadistic bitch looked ten times worse than what she'd inflicted on an innocent child.

And so he kicked her again. And then he punched her again. He swapped Soul Vision out for Biomancy so he could heal his building bruises and kept attacking. Another kick. Another punch. Over and over and over, until she stopped holding up her arms, stopped having the audacity to believe she had any right to try and defend herself from her punishment.

It took a while until John realised she had indeed stopped defending herself. The mirage had faded away, revealing a pale woman with mousy hair. It was hard to make out any detail of her features through the blood, but she looked plain, ordinary. Far from the kind of person you'd expect to gleefully torture a child to torment her father.

John decided not to focus on that, rushing over to Claire. In the time he'd been handling the Illusionist, the girl had managed to crawl to Curtis, and was sprawled across his upper body. The man was on his front, still as a statue. His chest wasn't moving. A flash of Soul Vision confirmed what he already suspected: there was no longer a silver sheen silhouetting the man's body. He was gone.

Claire was alive, though. Her chest was wracked with sobs, but at least it was moving. Her eyes were clenched shut when he reached her, from pain and grief all at once, but the rest of her body seemed… almost relaxed? There was an air of relief to her. He hadn't realised that her shoulders had been near-constantly hunched, because that was how she'd always been from the first moment he laid eyes on her, but now he could see what they looked like when they were relieved of whatever pressure had been weighing on them. It made her seem younger. Not carefree, per se, but less tense. Her fingers were bunched in the fabric of Curtis' cloak, and her face was pressed to the nape of his neck as she quietly cried.

Crouching down at her side, John tried to give her a respectful distance while he sorted through his menus. He'd gotten a bit of practice in with Biomancy in the last few minutes, and with a bit more experience with how it worked he hoped he'd be able to do something about her condition, and then get them both the hell out of here. What he'd actually do with her and where he'd go remained to be seen. This wasn't the ideal scenario by any means, but she was alive, at least, and would continue to be.

First, he Combined Biomancy and First Aid for a cool 10,000 Aura. There was a haptic buzz all throughout his body as the Spell and the Skill awkwardly merged together. It took much longer than Combining two Skills or two Spells typically would, and the wait was agonising when he could see the shallow rise and fall of Claire's back, but the job was soon done, and now he not only had an instinctive understanding of his body's biological processes when the Spell was active, but also some considerable medical knowledge to go with it, too. Healing his bruised knuckles was suddenly a breeze. Like this, he wouldn't have to worry about growing horrific tumours in his body or anyone else's through sheer ineptitude. Or so he hoped.

Next, though, he had to find a way to alter Biomancy so he could use it on other people. It wasn't going to be easy, to say the least. From what he could tell, the minds behind the system absolutely would not approve of an ability that let people heal other people. He'd have to come at it from an odd angle, if it was going to work at all.

But just when he was about to open his menus and browse the possibilities, Claire's eyes fluttered open and fixed blearily on him. They were bloodshot and filled with tears, and one look at her was enough to know she was devastated, her entire world crashing down around her ears once again.

But at the same time, much like had been present in the easing of her shoulders, he could see relief there, too.

"Please don't," she whispered.

John's brow furrowed. He swallowed. "Don't what?"

"Don't heal me. Just let me go."

John closed his eyes. He'd known exactly what she meant. He didn't know why he'd bothered to ask. "Claire—"

"I've already died once. This is better than the last one, I think. It's not so bad." She wheezed a painful-sounding cough. Her eyes drifted shut, and she nuzzled her face deeper into her father's neck. When she continued, her voice was wistful, carefree, dreamlike, "At least this time, I'm not all alone. Daddy's here."

For a long moment, John was lost for words. "That's… This doesn't seem fair."

"Yeah," Claire murmured.

"Are you sure, Claire?"

The girl nodded. Her breathing was getting deeper, calmer somehow. "It's hurt for so long. I kept going for Daddy. But if he's not here, then why keep hurting?"

"I can make it stop hurting, I think."

"No."

"It's a Spell that lets me mess with my own biology. I think if I rejig it a bit with some other Spells, it would let me heal you too. It wouldn't hurt anymore. You'd be healthy as any other girl your age."

"Even if you made it better, I'd still hurt. You couldn't get the part that matters." She squeezed her dad's torso, her arms trembling from the effort. "Nothing could make it all go away, so what's the point? Only Mommy could have made it stop, and she's not here."

John thought of some of his other Spells. "I could… Maybe I could heal your dad, too? Would that make it better?"

That time, her eyes snapped open, fixing him with a glare far too ferocious for a sickly child. "If you did that, I'd hate you forever. Enough people have been hurt because of me. Like this, only I hurt, and only for a little longer. It's better this way." Her gaze softened, a small smile pulling at her lips. "It's fine. I'll see Mommy and Daddy again soon anyway. They'll be together again, and we'll all be happy."

There was no reply he could give to that. He wasn't sure he could have said anything if he wanted to, with that damn lump in his throat. Claire's eyes soon drifted shut once more, and they didn't open again. Her breaths got shallowed and shallower, rattling in her chest until they were barely moving at all.

John watched for a long time, feeling blank. Even after she was still, he just stared. Even after he'd confirmed with Soul Vision that there was no longer a silver sheen clinging to her body, he found himself transfixed.

It didn't feel right. It didn't feel fair. It felt like he'd been doomed to fail from the start, somehow.

That feeling of unfairness, of being cheated, quickly morphed into an anger that pulled a red tint over his vision and sent him lurching to his feet, fists clenched and teeth bared, ready to take his fury out on the sadistic piece of shit who'd dare do this to a child.

But it bled away just as quickly as it had come when he laid eyes on her prone form. Soul Vision was still active, and it showed him nothing from the Illusionist.

"Oh," he breathed.

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