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Book 2: Chapter 44
🕑 Added 2025-11-12 19:00:10 +0000 UTCIt seemed to Luke that every car he got into these days was driven by some crazy person with a death wish. Speeding, rounding sharp corners without slowing down, and disregarding everyone around them was par for the course, and Mumu was no exception. To Luke's surprise, they headed out of town and stopped in the small parking lot of a gas station.
"What are we doing here? Didn't you say we were going to the train station?"
"Did I?" Mumu asked, shaking her head and pointing out into a forest. "We're going down there. Follow the path!"
Luke raised an eyebrow. "What?"
"Hurry!" she shouted and started jogging.
Luke, bewildered, followed. It wasn't difficult to keep up, since she was slow, wheezing, and coughing with every step.
Passing her, he half-turned without stopping. "You shouldn't smoke."
"Shut up," she panted, pulling strands of her unruly hair from her face. "Almost there."
Being in the forest was quite nice. It was quiet except for some birdsong, and the dirt path they were on didn't prove too difficult to follow. The air was fresh. He breathed in, enjoying being in nature. The trees ended in a steep slope down after a few more minutes of walking. Stopping, he peered over the lip, down at two parallel train tracks.
"There we go," Mumu said, coming up behind him. "Much easier than breaking into a closed station."
"What?"
She pointed down to the tracks. "Down we go."
Taking care not to fall, they made their way down, and she got down to sit on the tracks, waving for him to join her. He did so and was about to ask what the hell they were doing when she grabbed his forearm and the world shifted. The forest was no more. Instead, a train station appeared. It was full of sound. People talked to each other or on their phones, speakers blared information, and trains were moving.
Mumu was already on her feet, pulling on his arm. "Get up!"
"Huh?" he asked, turning to look up at her.
"TRAIN!" she shouted, pointing behind him.
Luke turned.
"Shit!"
He scrambled to his feet as people began to shout from up on the platform. Several hands reached down to grab both Mumu and Luke, and they rolled over the lip just as a train came roaring past.
"What in the fuck?!" Luke shouted at Mumu, who had a bit of a haunted look on her face.
She took out a cigarette and lit it, sighing as she exhaled the smoke. "Well, it was quick, wasn't it, pumpkin?"
People were backing away. Security guards were rushing toward them.
"You could have warned me," Luke said, standing and swaying a little, trying to get his sense of balance back. "We should run before the guards get here."
"Nah," she said. "My job is done. I'm heading back. There's a car for you out front, they said. Take care now."
With that, she jumped back down to the tracks. People didn't even have time to start shouting again before she disappeared. Luke, unsure what to make of her strangeness, hurried into the crowd, disappearing from the guards' line of sight, thinking about Mumu. An interesting ability that, being able to travel through metal. Kind of niche, but there were probably other aspects of her class.
He'd noticed her mana channels as soon as she arrived, so he knew she was Integrated, but hadn't put two and two together until she whisked him across more than 400 miles. What a crazy lady! Like she'd promised, a car waited for him out front. This was one of those company cars with a driver who opened the door with a polite smile but didn't say a thing until they arrived at the building where Luke healed Alan.
It had changed quite a bit. Before, the signage out front had proclaimed the many companies operating within. Now, it just said Integrated Solutions Incorporated. They'd taken over the building. Rather than everyone inside wearing suits, a much younger crowd milled about within, most of them in normal street clothes, most of them looking a little lost. Walking past them to the reception desk, Luke was intercepted by a familiar face.
"Luke! I heard you're joining us after all."
"Cass, hey," he said, nodding to the large group of waiting people. "Who're they?"
She smiled. "Initiates."
"To the guild?"
"Yup," she confirmed, gesturing for him to follow her to the elevators. "Just like you. Come on, they're waiting for you."
"Who?"
"Mr. Schmidt, of course, and his guest."
"The one I'm supposed to heal?"
The doors closed, and she held up an ID tag to a scanner, which beeped, before pressing the button to the topmost floor. Turning, she nodded. "That's right. Some rich friend of his."
Luke shrugged. "I won't say no to some cash."
"Cash?" she asked, handing over a clipboard she'd been carrying. "Sign these."
"Yeah. Alan pays me to heal his buddies. What are these?"
"Guild enrollment and employment. With a salary, you won't need the extra money."
He took the clipboard from her. "So serious."
"You expected a place called Integrated Solutions Incorporated to be lax and carefree?"
Reading through the documents, it looked like your standard employment agreement with more than decent pay, flexible working hours, and even plenty of PTO. He shook his head, sighing. "Guess I have a job again."
"I'm sure you'll enjoy it," Cass said, accepting the clipboard back.
The elevator dinged, and the doors opened.
"Why are you here? This isn't part of the job, is it?"
"Well, kind of," she said. "Many of us do things not related to killing monsters all day, every day, and I volunteered."
He raised an eyebrow. "Oh?"
"I didn't get a chance to say thank you for, you know, piecing me back together again. It wasn't a pleasant experience."
"It wasn't," Luke agreed. "And you're welcome. I'll piece you together anytime."
Cass smirked and pointed with a pen toward an office in the back. "I'll hold you to that. You can just head through there."
"Thanks," he said, and then he found himself alone again.
Voices drifted over from the open door into the office, and inside, Luke found Alan and an older Asian woman chatting, both of them standing in front of his desk. She was in her early fifties, if he had to guess, but her shoulder-length bob didn't have a single gray strand among the jet black hair, and her face was smooth, almost unnaturally so. Alan wore the high-powered executive suit and tie he'd used even in the Tutorial Dungeon.
"Ah!" Alan exclaimed. "If it isn't our newest recruit! Luke Quinn, this is Ms. Takanawa, the woman I told you about."
He took her hand. "Pleased to meet you."
Takanawa inclined her head and bent her knees ever so slightly. "Mr. Quinn."
"You need healing," he said. It was not a question.
"Direct as always," Alan said with a laugh, gesturing to a pair of leather chairs facing each other. "Please sit."
"My diagnosis is dire," Takanawa began. "When Mr. Schmidt reached out to me, I could hardly believe his assertion that he knew someone who could help where modern medicine had failed."
"I see it. Bone marrow," Luke said.
Takanawa shot a look at Alan, who held up his hands. "I haven't told him anything."
"Is there anything you can do?"
"It's aplastic anemia?" Luke asked, certain he was right.
Tears formed in her eyes. "That's right. An aggressive form."
Aplastic anemia was a rare disease of the bone marrow, where it stopped being able to create new blood cells, or at least not enough of them. When Alan first mentioned this woman, Luke thought she had some serious injury with an internal organ being messed up, or something, but this was quite something else. While it didn't look to him like she had all that long left to live, it wasn't like she would fall down dead within hours, days, or even weeks. It was a slow, unpleasant death. Some lived years, with the right treatment, but quite a few didn't make it that long.
Why the bone marrow didn't do its job, Luke didn't have a clue. That was beyond his knowledge, and it wouldn't look great to start searching online for the information now, and he didn't need to, anyway. The symptoms were clear to him, and the way to deal with them too. If he had the time to do proper research and improve on his skills a little more, he might be able to work out a proper way to fix this, rather than hit the illness with the blunt hammer called Weaver's Renewal, but Luke wasn't there just yet.
Diagnosis-wise, yes, almost. Sort of. Weaver's Perception made for some interesting changes compared to Weaver's Eye in that regard. While it still allowed him to pick out and identify injuries, illnesses, and the like, it went a little deeper than that now. Hints of hormones, blood makeup, infection, they were all there for him to find. But that wasn't all. Luke realized he could sense all these problems in their mana channels, too. With the physical and metaphysical realms so close together in a person, the two mirrored each other. A broken arm meant destroyed mana channels. Easy to spot, easy to fix. An infection, though, was a more difficult prospect. It wasn't like he could create antibiotics with Needle of Life, but he could, at the very least, destroy the source of the infection, if there was a specific one, and with Weaver's Perception, he could see the affected mana channels. Fixing those might just mean healing the physical aspect, too. Something to explore later, not with this rich woman in front of Luke's new boss, and not when he had the tools to just brute-force his way through the meeting.
Reaching out with Threads of Mana, Luke closed his eyes. "This won't hurt, but it could feel a little strange."
